


My Home Sweet Homicide

by Billywick, hisboywriter



Series: Outlast Roleplay Fiction [1]
Category: Outlast
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 06:40:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 40,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1734842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Billywick/pseuds/Billywick, https://archiveofourown.org/users/hisboywriter/pseuds/hisboywriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In order to survive the insanity of Mount Massive Asylum, Waylon Park adopts a few new strategies to get past The Groom and hopefully, the hell out of there.<br/>(this is a long rp fic so if the very frequent pov switching is obnoxious to you, you probably won't want to read) Graphic violence and dub-con.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I disappear

**Author's Note:**

> Again, this is an rp. That means we're jumping back and forth between the pov. It also means we soften Waylon's approach and make a little room for interaction between Eddie and Waylon. You might feel that to be OOC, idk. Then again, if you're looking for something completely in character you're probably not gonna read slashfic anyway. I'm babbling.

It was too good to be true.

Waylon had never been an advocate for fate or destiny. Even the union with his wife had been a product of her tenacity than a deity's longing to bring them together. His high marks at Berkeley proved that with will and actions, plus a little talent on the side, earned you more than waiting around for a stroke of genius to motivate you.

So he didn’t believe his wife when she claimed this two week contract with Murkoff was fate. They lived a comfortable, if mundane, life, but there was always money needing to be saved, and with a newborn that meant instant college savings they couldn’t use from funds to do what ordinary couples did--fix the roof, redo the kitchen, reupholster the carpet, go on vacation.

The pay from this gig would tie him over a long while. They had specifically asked for him too upon finding his skill sets, and they sounded urgent in their need. It was a nice ego boost and he would be a fool to say no, right?

Upon first glance at the asylum, he felt a chill tickle up his spine. He never liked hospitals, less so ones with mental patients, but most people felt that way. A man in a crisp suit worth more than Waylon’s laptop greeted him and guided him inside.

It was surprisingly decent inside. He half expected memories of old horror movies with patients twitching in corners and screams filling the space above him to be true, even if diluted. To his delight, the place was better inside than out, upgraded with technology around every corner and virtually sleek in looks and feel. He didn’t see any patients roaming around.

The man lured him through particular pathways, none of which passed rooms that housed patients. He saw some offices where security resided, and then a network of wires and the like in a room he supposed he would get some of his work done.

“Ah, welcome. Thank you for coming on short notice. Jeremy Blaire.” 

Blaire’s smile fit his greasy hair. Waylon cracked a weak smile and shook his hand, noting how much harder Blaire’s grip was.

“I trust you read over all the documents we sent you?”

Waylon nodded. “I signed them. Ah, you know, the privacy laws and such.”

He handed a file over he had tucked under his arm. Blaire flipped through it, shut it, smiled wider. His eyes raked over Waylon that made him shift.

“Great. Welcome aboard. Let’s get you to work, shall we?”

-x-

He was put to work, and they recognized how good he was at his job. What began as minor patches in systems upgraded him to a level three security and access to higher networks, all of course monitored. They gave him security but he was not free.

With a higher clearance meant no outside contact. He was antsy already having to stay the night in a private wing of the asylum where some other personnel slept (guards, mostly), but losing that last string that reminded him this was a temporary arrangement disrupted him.

Still, he worked. There were a laughable amount of levels to the security systems, so much so that he couldn’t help wonder why a charity organization would require it. No one hacked into charity organizations, not really.

Plus, there was the curiosity of no women around. When he’d try to reach for human contact in a lame joke about the lack of women, to a guard observing him, he’d just got a stern look. Maybe the inmates responded badly to women? That was a weird theory, but what else was there? Surely not sexism.

Then, the cameras.

It arrived four days into his job. There was an error on an entire stream of security monitors in the east side. He’d been called to assess it, fix it, and ensure it didn’t happen again. Just as he executed the job perfectly, the screens flickered on, as expected, but he wasn’t prepared for what he saw.

In his area of the asylum, he didn’t see nor hear inmates. He had been told early on not to ask about them, and the one time he did, Blaire had laughed and remarked with the old saying of curiosity killing cats. Somehow Waylon got the feeling Blaire saw him as a cat, and not in any good way.

But no amount of curiosity prepared him for the...torture. It was the first word that clawed at him, made him tear away his gaze and stare at the officers. He realized too late he was stupid for thinking they would see and react as he did.

One of them stared evenly at him and said. “You’re done here.”

So he left, trembling hands gathering his pitiful belongings that were no more his than the company’s. He stared ahead, stuck in the memory of seeing the inmates, distorted and flailing wildly, at the scientist looming over one of them and--

He promptly threw up the moment he got back to his room.

And maybe he relied on logic too much that it lied to him in telling him he misunderstood what he saw, and that all the twists in his gut were products of missing his kids. Nothing more.

Right. Nothing more.

-x-

What Waylon Park saw in his one, brief glimpse of horror didn’t encapsulate the experience of Mount Massive for those unfortunate enough to be patients. Former inmates, murderers, con artists, it was more a home for the criminally insane than anything else. Some of them were mild cases combined with dire psychological turmoils. Others not so much.

Of all the dozens of patients that suffered Murkoff’s experiments, there were three who were exposed to a heavier level of attention and subsequently, torturous experimentation. Therapy, they called it. What a joke in the face of mental medicine, truly. One in bad taste.

Not that one of the three ‘core’ patients was aware of it. He could barely afford the thought space to consider how horrible his situation truly was, and he was the mildest of the three. His name at least, he remembered. Who he was blurred more every day and had never been all that secure to begin with.

Edward Gluskin. That was the name they called him, with mocking affection, Eddie. He’d arrived here second to Billy Hope, the ‘star’ of the therapy programme. But Eddie didn’t know the other dreamers, nor the patients. His sessions were endless, and every time the door of his ‘cell’ opened, another piece of his mind escaped.

The grip on reality was bound to his senses, and most commonly, pain. The pain of the handling by the guards, the pain of the forced dreams, the pain of the tubing that felt like searing hot flames in his throat. 

He’d begged, he’d cried, he’d sworn and cursed and threatened, but nothing swayed those in charge of him. Eddie knew he was nothing but a human guinea pig to them, expendable, replaceable. 

So he told them lies. Told them what they wanted to hear. Men always liked that, even if they knew the truth. Lies, lies to make the pain less, to endure less of the endless cycle.

Oh, Eddie promised himself fantasies of revenge, how he would punish these god damn rapists, how they would cry and beg and he would ignore them.

But not yet. Not now. Possibly not ever. What year was it? Had he been in here all his life? Was he sleeping, or was he awake? The difference between dreams and life was thin, slim to none. Life was a nightmare, and nightmares came to haunt his life when he was awake.

-x-

Days stretched for as long as months. Waylon felt that way, even it it was only a week into his contract. For a while after that first incident, he’d wrestled it aside as a delusion or mishap, but then he saw it again. And then he just knew.

Logic toyed with him again. It now assured him the glimpses he’d seen on camera feed perpetuated a living hell for these poor souls. It didn’t matter what they had done or how disconnected from reality they were before coming here. No human earned such cruelty.

It was thoughts of his family that rooted him to keep at it, to force his hands steady, to swallow the lumps in his throat. There was irony in his situation, he admitted that. His wife had always been the stricter of the two in terms of how bad-doers should be treated. He’d earned her stare more than once when he ultimately would reveal he felt punishment and deterrence didn’t accomplish much, even on the most sadistic.

Just one of many arguments he missed having. Anything than this. Thoughts of her caused him turmoil on both ends of the spectrum. Would he be able to come back from this to her unscathed? She’d ask about his job, always wanting to know details.

Somewhere on the heels of that thinking, came another prospect.

Could he keep quiet to her, to the world?

It was a notion that had his head reeling.

“Park?”

Waylon blinked out of his mind, realizing his hands were frozen above the keyboard. Leave it to Blaire’s voice to jostle him out of it.

“Mr. Blaire,” he said in a shaky exhale. “I didn’t see you come in…”

Blaire’s smile didn’t comfort him. He swore it was twisting into something uglier each time. He got that feeling that Blaire wouldn’t hesitate to metaphorically skin his hide if it meant keeping up his appearance.

“Just checking in. I heard you had a rough couple of days.”

Waylon cleared his throat and forced his eyes back on his work. “No, just...it’s hard being away from home.”

“Ah, yes, you have that lovely wife and kids, hm?”

He wasn’t surprised Blaire knew of his background, but it chilled him how he said ‘wife’ and ‘kids’. It had him grit his teeth and bite his tongue.

“Well,” Blaire went on,” I understand. You do too, I’m sure, the need for precaution. You must have questions.”

“I...um, no...I mean…”

Blaire laughed that grating laugh of his. “It’s alright. I get it. You see, we are a charity but we’re working on something yet to be disclosed. We can’t, not without results.”

“Re...results?”

“Yes. Therapy. People often forget the criminally insane, Waylon. Left to live out the remainder of their miserable lives. But see, here, we’re working to help them. Maybe give a chance for a better life.”

It was all sugar coated and sweetly wrapped. Waylon forced a nod. To bring out the details of what he saw would be a bad move, that much he knew.

“So, they’re sick and you think you can make them better,” he summarized, hoping he didn’t sound as pitiful as he felt.

“Rightly so.”

‘Better’ was subjective, but Waylon kept that to himself. Blaire was still watching him, not even glancing at the monitor or anything that wasn’t directly Waylon.

“I guess I didn’t know what to expect,” he finally answered.

“You’re a smart man. I could tell when I read up on you. We need discretion. You already have seen things, hence those documents you signed.”

Waylon nodded again, feeling a crick in his neck. He didn’t just see them. He was haunted by them. As far as he could tell, there were three inmates that received the worst of it, and of course needed the most security and camera coverage.

“I know,” Waylon said. “I can...appreciate your need for privacy on your project.”

He didn’t like the way Blaire patted his back.

“Good man. You know, you’re welcome to come take a peek, see what I’m talking about in more detail. It might put your mind at ease.”

Waylon didn’t think there was an opening for refusal. So he agreed, and was soon taken to a control center looking room he had yet been privy to enter. There, monitors bombarded him. The focus was on one of the three perpetually tormented inmates, currently being dragged from his room.

“That one’s Eddie,” Blaire said. “He’s a serial murderer. Nasty business, but we think he’s not lost to society yet.”

Waylon swallowed hard. Eddie was a big guy, tall and somehow still packed with muscle. It required five men to handle him.

“Is he...delusional?”

“I think a serial killer of his caliber would be considered so, yes.”

Five guys and still Eddie struggled with everything he had. He dragged his feet, made himself heavy, almost toppled three of them with one of his erratic movements. He knew where he was going, even if he didn’t know what the end of the cruel means of his therapy were. Why he was struggling, only his defiant soul could know, god knows nothing had ever come of it except lessened rations and even worse handling by the guards.

“No, No! No not again! Please no not again!” Pleading, as always, got no response whatsoever. Eddie threw his weight around, he had not been sedated yet. Yet. Still a chance to be a pain and not surrender to this tyranny.

“You jack-booted fucks, I know what you’ve been doing to me! Fucking rapists!”

Waylon felt the room tilt as he watched this Eddie. He’d heard expressions of man acting like animals. It was another horror to see it in action, to witness humanity stripped to the barest barbaric behavior in order to survive.

Blaire’s hand on his shoulder kept his tongue in check.

“We try not to sedate them too much. Messes them up, you see. So it’s a little frightening to see him like this, isn’t it?”

“Why...does he call them rapists?” He couldn’t help ask and winced internally.

“Ah, unfortunately, many of the patients have contorted fantasies. Sexualized ones that manifest when they’re being taken or during their therapy sessions.”

Waylon noted the hand still on him. Blaire was wrong. The way Eddie struggled, the manic look in his eyes told everyone there was truth in his fear. It wasn’t just the depravity of a madman. Right?

He could only watch as the monitor flickered to the room Eddie was dragged into, then strapped. He looked away as it began, but Blaire still did not release him.

“You see, it is a sad fate, the man out of his mind,” Blaire said, dramatically.

Waylon didn’t want to think his gut was right, but it was telling him Blaire showed him this not to humor a fake interest in patients. He was exposing a warning, of what would happen to anyone who jeopardized his project.

“You see?” Blaire asked again, squeezing his shoulder harder. 

“Yeah...I see,” Waylon said.

-x-


	2. Einsam

He saw. Too much.

His fingers never quaked so much as he backspaced and retyped the email. Maybe he’d just feel better writing, ward off some nightmares plaguing his conscience, right?

No, that wasn’t enough.

He hardly thought of his family now. Every waking moment spun dizzily around this hell. It was hell. Greed and a shitload of money had allowed this to happen. Money. It truly was the root of all evil. You could buy loyalty with it. 

He wouldn’t be like that. He couldn’t.

Email done.

Send?

Don’t send.

Somewhere above him he head his name. A page, maybe. Or his own conscience ashamed of him.

Waylon stared at the screen.

Send.

Someone called his name, louder.

He startled, shut the laptop, met a guard that told him there was an issue. He mechanically went to the control room, feeling like everyone knew what he had done. He breathed deeply and kept walking. 

Andrew greeted him. A scientist of some sort that jeered at him silently since he met the man, who was madder than the inmates. He loomed over him as Waylon he patched up the error. He was too aware of Andrew’s voice ensuring everyone how cooperative he was.

Then, there was Eddie again.

Hell had never ended for Eddie, and unlike Park, he didn’t have the luxury of not being subjected to Murkoff’s ever so shady experiments. It wasn’t every day he was put into the morphogenetic engine, but a horror story nonetheless when they dragged him into the large room that contained the monstrous machine.

Such as today. His struggles had been even more frivolous in the face of the guards’ determination, but Eddie was far and beyond fearing them as anything but dogs executing orders. What frightened him most were the dreams he no longer could keep separate from his reality, his mind blurring memory with awful fantasy. And no man, no being, wanted Eddie Gluskin’s memory.

But today differed in so much as that Eddie actually managed to break free of the guard’s strained grip, and he ran, anywhere, spotting a thick glass wall to a room which contained the spectators to his torture. Yet there was one face in there, one that looked shocked when he threw himself bodily against the window. A young-looking man with pale blond hair and trembling hands was right before him, could probably hear him.

“You! I know you can stop this! You have to help me! They’ll rape me, please help me PLEASE!”

Waylon’s heart felt as though it had torn from his chest, for multiple reasons. Eddie saw him, looked right into his eyes as another human being, or on the brink of becoming a husk of one, and begged for mercy.

And Waylon could do nothing. No, he had done something, but was he too late?

The focus on Eddie reeled back on the gun suddenly on him. He kept his hands up, stumbled back, and refused to wilt. It was a feat given how his legs felt like goo.

The officer steered him out, and Eddie was just another notch on the torture chart, hauled back from the window and away.

Waylon saw his face with each step, and he felt a little bolder with them. He’d done the right thing. Maybe it wasn’t too late for Eddie. For hope.

He had to grab his laptop and then he was out of this fucking place.

He hurried into the back room.

His laptop.

Blaire.

That smile again.

Sweet words came at him, but all he saw was his laptop fondled by Blaire. He vaguely picked up the word ‘crazy’, ‘volunteer’, ‘engine’. What?

“Wai-”

Once, when he was seventeen, he’d gotten a fist in his face for stupidly intervening on a fight that was breaking out. It was the first time he’d been hit like that and it had him seeing spots. It fucking hurt and terrified him.

This punch was a new level of pain that knocked him to the ground, had him see black all over. Another blow, the word depraved by Blaire’s voice, and then, nothing.

-x-

He hadn’t dreamed in a long time it felt. This was the first he saw images, fleeting like breezes, of his family. He reached for them, and each time they evaporated like fog between his fingers. That was as bad as the nightmares he had of the inmates.

He awoke with a startled gasp, choking on it. As the coughing fit ebbed, he felt fear forcing him into a panic. He blinked hard, breathed, and remembered himself.

He couldn’t move.

He was in a room that was once white gone faded with years of unpainted neglect and perhaps the palpable horror that had occurred within it. He was strapped down to a mattress, so much like those--

No. No, no, no.

Panic overcame his senses. He started shouting with all the will he had and jerked his arms in the restraints, convinced with enough mind power he could break free.

“Sh....shhhhh....shhhhh.” 

The hisses came from across the room, and they were muffled by an unnatural lisp. Footsteps, heavy ones, fell across the floor, the person they belonged to obviously not wearing shoes.

Eddie leaned over Waylon where he was strapped down, blue eyes murky from burst blood-vessels, a rash of sorts devouring the right side of his face.

Still, the serial killer didn’t seem to notice the pain from such afflictions, looking down at his new cellmate with a little wonder and recognition.

“They’ll come if you’re too loud. Sh.”

Waylon had immediately shut up at the hiss, the very panic that had him struggling now warning him he needed to keep his mouth shut and pay attention. He did, and he yelped despite himself when that serial killer himself loomed over him, a demon come to live, only this time with no window between them.

Shit. That and ‘no’ tangled in Waylons’ head. He’d been put in the same room. Was he left to be killed? Would he die at Eddie’s hands? Why though? He recalled Eddie being a serial killer, but against women.

That held little water when he was face to face with the man.

His breathing came out in ragged pants.

Eddie was looking at him, telling him to be quiet. What had he said?

“They,” he repeated, licking his lips. “They...put me here. Like you. E...Eddie...right?”

“Hm,” Eddie nodded slowly, intently watching Waylon’s throat as it bobbed up and down. Something about the bump in it annoyed him. That unsightly adam’s apple destroyed the whole illusion of beautiful skin. Perhaps it could be hidden until it could be removed?

He watched his throat, then his chin, then his face. It was a frightened face, and it was still so smooth. This wasn’t a disfigured monster like the few others Eddie had seen, but it didn’t matter. No one who belonged to those behind the glass was left in such a defenseless state, alone with Eddie.

“Is that my name? Yes. Mr Gluskin. I know your face. It is a pretty one. And I know it. You’re not like them, you...you’re special.”

The serial killer’s hands were completely unhindered as they wandered over Waylon’s shoulders. When his breathing hitched, Eddie spoke again.

“I won’t do to you what they did to me. No, no, don’t worry.”

That couldn’t be his real name. It was barely a mockery of one, and one with implications that made Waylon sicker than he already felt. He didn’t think he could feel it more, but he did when Eddie pawed at his shoulders, leaned that much closer.

He didn’t want to see what had been done to him, and this time he couldn’t turn away.

But Eddie was still a man. A killer, yes, but a poor victim of treatments forced upon him. He even sounded more comforting than any of the personnel Waylon had spoken to, if albeit his voice had the tinge of a man coming undone, but not out of his own doing.

Waylon forced himself to nod to acknowledge Eddie.

“I...thank you,” he said, keeping his tone level. His arms braced against the restraints. Maybe Eddie could free him?

“Could you get me out of here? Please. They can’t get away with this.”

“Away? No, nobody is getting away. Not you, not me, not them, not him, not it.” Eddie didn’t acknowledge the request for help, instead pacing the room three times before he returned to hover over Waylon’s face again.

“You didn’t help me, now you need my help, and I don’t know your name. What kind of manners are those?” 

He laughed to himself, a note of hysteria in his voice, then his face turned serious again and he crouched until Waylon had to turn his head.

“You will run from me, won’t you? If I make you free. No, you’ll be my darling friend, keep the dreams away. Yes, you’ll stay here with Eddie.”

No, no, Waylon was losing the grip on Eddie like those of his family in his nightmare. Or maybe the delusion of the inmates was wearing off and he never had a grip to start with. The urge to shout, to curse and thrash, to become an animal if it meant coming out alive overwhelmed him to the point of making him dizzy.

Yet he fisted his hands, nails biting into skin. Slowly, he made himself look up at Eddie, too aware they were millimeters apart.

There was still humanity in Eddie, a piece of him that knew this place was insane and not worth wishing on any soul--though Eddie and the inmates might make the exception on the doctors and other employees of this place. Waylon had to believe he could reach Eddie.

Waylon remembered his family and met Eddie’s eyes. His stomach lurched, and yet he still held his eyes.

“Y-Yeah, we’re friends, Eddie,” he said. “I’m...Waylon. I saw...what they did to you, and I tried to stop them a-and,” he paused before he panicked again, “they caught me. Th...They told me you’re...a killer and need help, but...that’s not true. Not you. They just...took advantage of you.”

He wanted to turn away so badly. He almost did. Somewhere in the infested parts of his swelling paranoia he scolded himself for forgetting how depraved of decent human interaction and contact Eddie was. It was a necessity, and those bastards had given him the worst kind of it. 

“I’ll run, y-yes, but not away from you. W...With you. We have to get out of here, both of us...together to the end, yeah?”

Eddie eyed his newest source of entertainment with doubt and confusion. Someone who seemed determined to speak with him as if they truly were acquainted. Could it be true? Or was this another cruelty of his nightmares? What would this Waylon do if he unstrapped him from the bed?

“Yes, out of here...soon...but we’ll see,” he retreated from Waylon’s vision, the shackles on Waylon’s right leg coming undone. He was held still by Eddie’s hands on it though.

“No, wait, you’re gonna trick me, right? They always do. You bastard, you’re working for them!”

The shackle went back onto Waylon much tighter, and Eddie retreated across the room to his bunk, muttering something about ‘fucked up rapists’ and their puppets. He left Waylon as helplessly exposed as when he’d come in.

“No! No, no,” Waylon trailed off as he tugged and exhausted himself losing the battle against restraints, now made worse by the tighter shackle on his leg.

He’d just about cried out in frustration. So close. He’d been so close. He’d convinced Eddie. Now he had to convince Eddie this wasn’t the end, that life didn’t end for either of them here. True, he might not have believed that to be true for the serial killer, but if it meant getting out alive, he’d lie over and over.

He couldn’t stay here.

He wouldn’t.

“Eddie,” he called out, “Eddie...I’m not like them. I...I know they’re liars. They said things about you. We can stop them. We...you can have a life beyond this. I know it. You can. A better life, a...you know, get married even, have children. You can…”

“Married...married?” Eddie rolled the word around in his mouth, almost as if he’d never heard of it before. It suited his lips to form the word over and over again, forgetting Waylon’s existence in the room. A memory drifted before Eddie’s eye, but he’d long since learned to shut all sorts of thought that came with pictures out.

“I will get married. To the prettiest bride you’ll ever see. You will come to my wedding, right?” he spoke as he crept closer again, which wasn’t an easy task for such a big guy.

“Your name...your name is strange. Waylon. Waylon. Hm.”

“Yes, yes,” Waylon panted, his hitched breath in part due to Eddie’s resumed close proximity. “Of course...I’d go to the wedding. Front row seat.”

He resisted the urge to tug at the restraints. Somehow he believed it would detract from his pleas.

“Y-Yeah. Look, listen.....think you could let me out of--”

A rap on the door startled him. Even if he craned his neck he could not see past the bulk of Eddi’e shoulder. The voice the exuded in, however, he knew, and it washed his face gray.

“Awake at last,” Andrew said.

His fist hit the door in a sudden motion of violence. 

“Be a good boy, Eddie, and get back to your corner. We need to welcome our newest volunteer.”

“I’m not a volunteer!” Waylon yanked his pinned arms. “You can’t do this! What you’re doing is illegal and wrong!”

Eddie made no motion to do anything to help the strapped down Waylon, watching the situation as he headed away from the guards. He kept glancing back over his shoulder though, unsure what to make of the whole thing.

“You see what they do, you see? Fucking fascists, they’ll do it to you too!” 

His voice quivered.

Waylon refused to accept that. Denial promised he’d wake up from this nightmare, that the feel of brutish hands freeing him, only to invent a new pain brought on by humans, all products of bad dreams. He thrashed and aimed badly aimed kicks, and shouted for anyone to help.

Futile, he knew that as a raw truth festering deep down. If they could manhandle Eddie, how was he a challenge? He’d always been leaner than most, more toned than muscular, and now he regretted it.

His eyes darted around, searching for answers from deities he didn’t believe in. Already his limbs were quivering with fatigue, giving up the good fight. As they jerked him along, his gaze landed on Eddie momentarily.

Andrew was looming over, a sick contortion of his face making him look all the more twisted. The doctor’s hand rose-

It was like being seventeen all over again. It was sheer surprise that earned him the advantage to break his upper body free and knock his fists, wrists bound by a restraint, against Andrew’s temple. The man staggered into the wall as the muscle leapt back onto Waylon and held him in place.

“You sick fucker!” Waylon spat at the doctor. “Don’t touch him like that-Ah…!”

The blow shut him up good, and his restrainment to a wheelchair proved easy. Reality blurred before him, but he thought he saw Eddie’s form. He wouldn’t know for sure because a darker blur came close to him, grabbed his jaw hard. He felt something slick lap at the tackiness dribbling from his temple. It took him a moment to recognize the texture of a tongue.

“Bad move,” Andrew was saying. “Looks like our patient is more delusional than we suspected, men. Take him out.”

There was no telling for Waylon what happened next, exactly, but he did, in fact, not leave the cell. Reason for that being the massive cellmate he had tentatively tried to establish a connection to had risen from his corner and thrown a ‘tantrum’ as the doctors here called it, which meant broken noses and bones and a cursing Andrew stumbling out of the cell.

Eddie didn’t know why he suddenly felt like protecting this poor idiot who was still stuffed in here with him, but he liked the way he’d been defiant, and he had the slight feeling that Waylon, scrawny little Waylon, had piped up to protect him from harm. A futile effort, but an effort nonetheless. Somewhere between nightmare-ish memories, Eddie could still recognize basic human empathy. 

Which was probably why he was sat waiting for Waylon to regain consciousness, unstrapped from the table and dragged to a bunk by his bulky cellmate.

It didn’t take long to rouse Waylon from his restless unconsciousness. He awoke with a sharp cry flinging off his lips, hand clutching at his pounding heart. Everything swerved to one side and reality returned with a major ache in his wrists and head.

He groaned and decided it was a bad idea to sit up; he lied back down.

Sit up?

He forced his eyes open, feeling like it took ages to peel his eyelids apart. His arms were free.

He looked forward.

He inhaled sharply.

Eddie.

The nightmare was still ongoing.

What had happened?

Andrew had happened.

In a panic, he patted himself down with clumsy gestures, but found no new injuries. Save for his head, which he now clutched with one hand and felt caked blood.

“Eddie...I...what happened?”

His unfortunate cellmate was sitting nearby, eyes on Waylon with a sharp, watchful expression. Whatever happened, Eddie had bore witness to and it didn’t seem to frighten him all that much.

“They were gonna rape you. They rape everyone. Doctor’s the worst of all. Licks a lot. Sick fuck. I didn’t let them. Don’t really know why. I hate them.” Eddie pointed to the bed Waylon had been strapped to.

“That’s where they do it.”

Through effort and the help of fear, Waylon paid attention to what Eddie told him. Vivid nightmares born from reality confirmed that rape was not just a metaphor in these walls.  
Waylon struggled not to vomit. This was...this couldn't be where he was. It just couldn't.  
He curled into himself, catching his breath and slowing his heart down. He looked at Eddie periodically, still convinced the killer might unleash his misery on him.  
But it had been Eddie that spared him Andrew's perversion. For now.  
"You protected me," he rasped. Slowly, he pushed himself up to sit and not look at the bed.  
"Thanks," he murmured. It felt weird to say it given the circumstances, but what else could he say.  
What could he even do? They'd be back. This time prepared.  
His heart began pounding out of control again. He made the mistake of standing and collapsed against the wall, hearing his breathing lose itself in a rapid rhythm. He couldn't even think that so many men had endured this for months, let alone the few hours he had been here, and not yet tortured.

Eddie watched his struggle silently. It was entirely familiar, the shock on Waylon’s face as he went through every phase of what would happen to him here, and yet it was brand new to see it in someone else. Eddie’s sanity was a fragile little bridge over an abyss of violence, fear and hatred and everything Murkoff did to him rattled at the thin ropes of the bridge.

What could he do for Waylon? Nothing, really, just about the same as Waylon could do for him.

“When I was little...they are just like them, we need to get out, Waylon, Waylon, Waylon,” Eddie shook his head, tried to leave the fear out of his voice.

“You know how to get out? I’ll help, we can go together, but we have to go now!”

Waylon didnt think his skin could feel more infested with things that squirmed and churned. He didnt press Eddie for details, and part of him pretended he didnt hear it. He had enough to mull over as it was.

But he did hear what Eddie said last. Of all places, sanity and logic came from the somewhat unstable serial killer now. A serial killer whose help he required to escape. If nothing else, Eddie had the girth and power to serve as muscle.

At the time, Waylon couldn’t make sense of the question that popped up in his mind. Power. Eddie was big, yes, but he was sure he saw images flash by that must have been memories. Rippling power, the kind that even the greatest bodybuilders had.

He forgot about it as quickly as the images came up.

Gradually, he made himself get up and, very carefully, tread closer.  
When he was close enough, he extended his hand hesitantly. It took everything in him not to recoil.

Eddie was a victim and he needed his help. He told himself that repeatedly.

"Let's get the hell out of here."

Eddie watched Waylon’s hand, wondering what he was expected to do with the extended limb. Shake it? Bite it? The convicted serial killer looked up the arm, followed Waylon’s body, tracing every part of it until he met his eyes.

“How? Can’t break out. Tried, tried and tried again. Those fucking rapists, get you every time, every time.”

Waylon lowered his hand, realizing how farfetched his imagination was going. Eddie was in a delicate, critical state. What was he thinking? 

Rubbing his hand on his pants, he made himself sit next to the killer, albeit it a few scoots away.

“A...We need a plan, right? Next time they come...we just gotta...you know, outsmart them. You’re really strong. I’ve been in the control room. If I could just get there, we could find a way out easier.”

He cleared his throat, relaxed his breathing. “One of us has to...distract them. Then the other helps him break out.”

It sounded so simple. So stupid.

“You tried before but...alone. There’s two of us now. It...We have to make it seem like it was a mistake to put us together, you know, strength in numbers.”

Why they had done that, Waylon didn’t want to know but he assumed they either wanted to terrify him (job well done) or let Eddie murder him.

Probably the latter, considering the delicate and breaking mental state of Waylon’s cellmate. Eddie didn’t trust him, but that was because the meaning and tools to trust were long since removed from Eddie Gluskin. Way before he arrived in Mount Massive, in any case.

“Control room...the glass room? Where they always watch?” Eddie was at least trying though, so he seemed to still hold a vague notion of solidarity between inmates.

Waylon nodded, feeling an overwhelming rush of giddiness. Eddie was understanding him. Maybe his hope had yet to inspire action. They could get out.  
He could get out.  
Then what? In brutal honesty he didn't know. What would become of Eddie if he was out. He couldn't just return to society--  
The mind didn't process that. It was survival mode that kept Waylon alert.  
"They've been watching. They...what they did to all of them...you, thats wrong. They need to pay for that."  
He hesitated but saw the importance of establishing connection. He extended his hand on the grimy mattress, resting it near Eddie's thigh. He wasn't stupid enough to touch him. No, not with touch being an invitation to violence and synonymous with pain. 

“I want it to stop. I want them to die. Sick fucks. I’ll kill them, I’ll kill them, you’ll see.” Eddie looked over at Waylon now, much less the cornered animal, mad with fear and a broken mind, much more the vengeful man who’d broken through the barrier that kept most people from committing unspeakable violence.

“You wait. Won’t take us together. I’ve never had a roommate. They probably think I’m going to stick you, kill you, bleed you out. But I don’t do that. No, not me. Walker, yes, Walker would bleed you like a pig.”

Eddie shook his head and actually shuffled his rather large body closer to Waylon, touching his hand as if he hadn’t known human contact in years.

“You have nice skin. A nice face. Little for a man too. They’ll do horrible things to you too, but not if I am there.”

Waylon didn’t jerk his hand free despite his gut screaming at him to do so. Victim or not, Eddie was a serial killer, and prolonged exposure and victimization to torture could not bode well for the mind such as the one Eddie was no doubt plagued with before coming to this place. After all, they picked them for a reason, right?

“Y-Yeah, you got my back,” he said, allowing Eddie to touch his hand. 

Part of him still sympathized. He almost remembered Lisa’s scolding face whenever he’d put a dollar in for whatever charity rooted itself in front of a grocery store. She told him on multiple occasions he was a bit of a pushover, and the details Eddie illustrated on his looks probably didn’t help.

“We’ll bust out of here...just...we need to plan. They...they’re just bullies. They mess with you because they think they can. Made you think you are, but not anymore.”

“Right. A plan. Yes, a plan would be good.”

Eddie frowned as he looked at him, trying hard for a long moment to control his expression, before he offered Waylon a strained smile that looked more creepy than anything else.


	3. Hand of Blood

The next morning, Waylon was alone in the cell. 

For having a serial killer-turned-victim as a roommate and with the impending threat of torture (rape?), Waylon slept decently. It was a decent sleep in the barest form, in that he closed his eyes and had lost track of time for a while. Eddie hadn’t disturbed him in his sleep, or at least, not to the point where he noticed.

He didn’t wake up feeling better though.

Instead, dread overcame him. Like the time before, he had to calm his breathing, but this time he was struggling.

Eddie was gone. 

“Eddie?” he called.

A chuckle nearly had his skin leap off him. He whirled to see Andrew smiling from the window fixed into the door. He looked blurry. The whole room did now that he noticed. He stumbled and pressed a hand to his head.

“Ah, I see it’s taking effect. Don’t worry. It won’t kill you.”

Waylon could detect the glee even in his groggy state.

Whatever they had infused the room with, or injected him in sleep, it made it too easy for two men to haul him around. He tried to talk, but slurs spilled out in place of words.

“Your new buddy? Oh, don’t you worry about him. He’s doing as he’s meant to.”

Andrew might have kept talking. Waylon didn’t know.

He felt restraints, and he opened his eyes and saw himself in a chair. Screen bombarded him with white noise and...images? Rapid flickering. He shut his eyes. His head was killing him.

“Open those eyes,” Andrew said, suddenly in front of him. “You don’t have to wake up, but open your eyes.”

A slap, a tongue, more noise. Waylon could only hear his breathing, swallowing all the sounds of Andrew talking about...something. An error?

He didn’t know when they had left him, but he knew he couldn’t sit there and let the images play before him. He might have cried out during it. He might have not. 

When he returned to reality, as much as he could next, the images fizzled out in a snap. His arms, he could move them. 

Waylon grunted as he got up, and staggered, then crashing to the floor. He started when an inmate bashed against a clear wall, babbling nonsense about what could be heard. Waylon looked around, and then, nothing.

Darkness overcame the building. 

-x-

It had been only some hours since Eddie had woken up to being dragged into the engine, fallen into the usual nightmares, only to finally have his prayers answered and the awful dreaming stopped. When he came out of his spherical container, death had been all around him. Blood, guts, limbs and worse spattered the walls, sirens wailing unanswered in the background.

He’d stumbled from the icy underground, found a set of stairs and made his way through chaos and more death. The people he came across were, in simple words, fucked up. Eating, fighting, killing and fucking the doctors and guards that had tormented them for months and years. Eddie felt no kinship with their brutality, and they feared him, left him alone, didn’t dare come close.

Hours might have passed or maybe just minutes, but Eddie made himself a home in the former female ward. Here too had patients taken up refuge, nesting in every corner like rabid animals. But Eddie hadn’t been disturbed. They knew what was his, and after the first fourteen encounters, they knew to avoid him. 

How wonderful it felt to have woken up. He was so free now, and his dream was in reachable distance. He would have himself that wedding he always wanted, with the perfect bride at his side. Yes, he could hold the ceremony right here! 

Eddie found enough supplies to fuel his goal, fashioning himself something decent to wear (it always helped to be sharply dressed when impressing a gal) and made several designs for his to-be-wife’s bridal dress. She would look beautiful, the envy of all when she was on his arm!

When everything was prepared, Eddie fixed his bowtie, smoothed his hair, packed a razor-sharp knife into his pocket, and began to wander his ward. It was time to find his illustrious bride.

-x-

Survival outside the room, Waylon discovered, was not easier than momentary life he’d had in his cell. The inmates roamed free, prowlers in the dark, some quivering in corners or bashing heads into walls. Others, those…

Waylon panted as he caught his breath against the wall. Another chase, another moment he escaped the clutches of madness. He should have known. These inmates were fucked up, so badly that most existed on another plane he didn’t understand.

He saw brutality at its core. He saw more in these hours than most say in their entire life.

There was the smallest comfort he had a camcorder. Not only did it provide light in the most depraved parts of the asylum, it was documenting. Yes. He’d get out alive. He’d show what he’d seen.

He made notes along the way of what he saw, if only to get it out of his system for that brief time he had to scribble away before he had to skulk out of his hiding hole. He wrote to Lisa. Thinking of her kept him going, prevented him from becoming like one of those trembling in the corners.

The inmates weren’t there to help him. He’d seen them doing...what they did to guards and doctors, and he didn’t want to be one of them.

He’d even run into Blaire. Or rather, have Blaire lunge at him and try to stick him.

He’d not expected to see another sane (somewhat) person, or at least one not an inmate. But then Blaire had suddenly split, terrorized by other things. And that’s when Waylon recognized patterns of fears among the inmates.

All the while, Eddie was a lost memory to him. He wasn’t there to look for him. Not in this hell hole. Eddie was gone. There was only survival.

And his instinct told him the other inmates were scared of something. Not just bigger inmates, but one in particular. He’d heard some whispers about them, and one even seemed lucid enough to warn him to stay out of his sights.

Whoever it was, Waylon already knew he wasn’t going to cross paths with.

God, how he’d fucked up.

He’d fucked up so bad, and kept fucking up.

The closer he felt to freedom, the deeper he dug into the asylum. He took pathways inmates were too weak or unaware of taking. It was an endless cycle, and finally he’d entered a new area.

So close now.

The female ward. He’d strove to find this place earlier, knowing it must have been empty, for the most part. He’d been wrong of course. He’d heard voices, talking about...a groom? A woman? He wasn’t sure. What he was sure of was the horror when they spotted him, exclaimed and came at him with vigor.

“Get him!”

“We’ll give him as a gift! He won’t hurt us if he has him!”

Waylon cried out and bolted. He heard at least three chasing, and it felt like an eternity before he heard them cursing at each other’s insolence in the distance. Shit. He got away, but where was he now?

He swallowed and panted more. He couldn’t see anything, like he’d fallen into a deeper layer of hell. Using the camcorder’s night vision, he picked his way through.

Sewing machines. Blood smearing the walls in...wait, was that words? And it looked like a sketch of a woman in various dresses in the distance. No. If there was one thing he learned early not to do, was investigate.

He brushed it all aside as further madness and spotted a door that lead to a hallway.

Satisfied he was alone in the area, he went to it and rattled its doorknob. 

His search for the right girl had turned up nothing promising so far, but Eddie was far from giving up hope. She was out there somewhere, his perfect lady and future wife, he was sure of it. He’d already made a beautiful dress, prepared a wonderful ceremony. Surely, soon, his dream would come true.

And that’s when he saw her. Just beyond a door, she tried to open, to get to him, perhaps? Was it fate? Of course it was, there was a beautiful girl, and she had come right to him. Yes, this was the one.

Eddie put his hands on the glass of the door leaning close and putting on his most charming smile.

“Darling!”

Waylon leapt back and yanked up the camera on reaction, expecting an inmate and preparing to tear through the opposite direction. It was an inmate. It was...not like the others.

He breathed hard, unsure what about this one chilled him down to his bones. Those eyes pierced through him, exacerbated by the effects of night vision. But no, the man, a huge one at that, was smiling and...dressed unusual.

Waylon took a step back, but noticed the inmate was already walking away. Good.

Fuck.

He was coming around the other way.

Waylon’s heart escalated. He kept the camera up, praying, hoping that he’d have on stroke of mercy and not see the man coming around like he suspected.

Waylon would find himself unlucky, because Eddie had definitely seen him, and he knew every part of this ward like the back of his hand.

He stepped into the dark room, scanning the broken furnishings for a sign of his lovely bride. Of course, he understood his bride was still a man, but Eddie knew a surefire way to fix that unsightly mistake and they would have the happiest family together. It only remained to find this shy beauty.

“Did I frighten you? I’m awfully sorry, I didn’t mean to,” his footsteps echoed through the room, but he could hear his little treasure breathing hard and fast. So he had startled the little lamb.

“There’s no need to hide, darling. Come on out into the light.”

It was talking to him.

Waylon tried desperately not to let that detail give him the heart attack trying to happen since this nightmare began. He kept the night vision on, watching the man walk the air of a man who had all the time in the world to savor.

He couldn’t stop his ragged, quick breathing. As quietly as he could muster, he tucked himself under a table, knowing the man would get bored or distracted like all the others and leave him alone.

So wrong, Waylon was so very wrong. Eddie continued stalking through the room, and after having made the round once, he began to open the lockers, and ducked to look under tables.

“Darling, this is a little ridiculous. There’s really no need to hide from me. You and I are meant to be. Don’t be shy.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck.

Waylon’s hand trembled. This wasn’t like the others. It was intelligent, hunting, then picking on details to explore deeper. He didn’t think he could get more terrified and it was misery incarnate to be proven so wrong.

He was trapped. He knew that, and he wouldn’t dare let himself be caught like the meek mouse he felt.

Swallowing hard and waiting until the groom-looking man turned his back to open a locker, Waylon crawled out from under.

He bolted right past the groom and rounded the corner with fire in his heels.

Oh, she was feisty, this minx of his. She was going to play with him, make him chase until she finally rewarded him for his patience. Eddie couldn’t help but smile at that thought. What a little pearl she was turning out to be!

He gave chase immediately, unhindered by the obstacles she cleared. Their chase was a tease, and although Eddie did enjoy it, he longed to hold her, to have her close, to make her as she ought to be.

“Darling! You’re really going to make me work for your love, aren’t you, you little minx?” He could see now, see his target up ahead, in unsightly rags like most others wore in this place. How wonderful she’d look in a dress! 

Intelligent. And fast.

Waylon sucked in all the air he could as he sprinted and hopped over obstacles. His body quaked with fatigue. There was no way he’d outrun this groom. He was just too fast, too hungry.

Unable to do much else, he screamed back as he kept hauling ass, “You’re wrong! I’m not your darling! Get the fuck away from me!”

Another corner--

Waylon gasped and felt the ground meet his back hard. He blinked up through the dizziness and saw a brute of an inmate glowering down at him with one, bright eye.

“Don’t look at me!” the inmate shrieked, grabbing for Waylon’s scrambling form and yanking him back.

Eddie had easily kept up, ignoring the screeching fear in his to-be-bride’s voice. She couldn’t really be scared of him, right? No, he’d been charming so far, and she only had to get to know him a little, surely she-

What was this? Eddie had rounded a corner that his darling had just disappeared behind, only to find his target on the ground, clawing desperately as a brute-ish fellow dragged at her legs. Eddie lost his smile, and rage took over immediately. Was she seeing other men? No, not with that look, this was nothing short of-

The speed with which he leapt into action, crashing knife-first into the other inmate was terrifying to any unfortunate enough to bear witness.

“How dare you lay HANDS on my bride!” Eddie felt the rage tear through him as quickly as he slashed at the inmate’s throat and face with the knife, blood cascading, bathing the ground, the gurgling of a dying man filling the air.

The groom tore the inmate off Waylon, and paid retribution upon him for laying hands on his bride. In that instant, Waylon breathed with a modicum of relief.  
He might have been spared one inmate's attention, but this place had taught him to trust no one. Especially one that ripped apart another as he saw.  
A grunt escaped him as he tried to stand, and deflated against the wall. His legs. Shit. He looked over to the groom.  
"Please...don’t..."

“Darling, did he hurt you?” Eddie whirled to look at his little treasure, oblivious to the blood staining his ‘sharp’ outfit, and oblivious to the corruption of his face. He was full of concern as he stepped towards the trembling Waylon.

“Here, let me help you,” when she flinched away, Eddie tutted, “I have been a little vulgar, I know. I’m just so excited to meet you,” Eddie frowned and came ever closer, his looming height and girth all the more obvious now he stood before Waylon.

“You look so familiar. Have we met before?”

Waylon grimaced. He needed to buy time, to renew his strength. Just a few more breaths.  
The groom was so close, inhaling his scent practically. He couldn't know him. He must remind the groom of someone at best. Right?  
In the dim light the corridor provided, he picked up on the face, one he didn't want to look at but he did for reasons unknown to him. The voice too...firm and confident but...familiar.  
"Eddie?"

The expression on the Groom’s face lit up with recognition, and now there was no careful hesitation in coming closer. There was also no escaping the way Eddie enclosed his bride in his arms, hauling Waylon up with an ease eerie even for his size.

“Darling! Yes, right before I woke up, I dreamed of you! How wonderful that we are together now. It will be...you will be beautiful.”

Eddie held his bride tenderly, with a knife pressed to Waylon’s throat.


	4. Die, die my Darling

It couldn't be. Had delusion found its grasp on Waylon at last? Surely after all this time feeling like days here he was susceptible to mental illness himself.  
No. Eddie was not a figment. Even if he was, the threat of him was very real. Whatever had happened extended beyond Waylon's comprehension or willingness to comprehend it.  
The blade was too real. Eddie held him so easily, and could just as easily crush him.  
But he had to take advantage of the situation. Eddie knew him. Somewhat. He was spared once more. For now.  
"I...Eddie," he said again, pressing a hand against a broad chest but he couldn't even push away. "It...yeah, it's me. Waylon. We were..."  
Shit his breath was coming so hard he could hardly talk.  
Out. They had to get out.  
"We need to get out of here," he rasped.

“Out? Darling, you’ve just arrived,” Eddie didn’t relinquish his prize, nor did he lower the knife. Some part of him must have been aware of Waylon’s reluctance, but that part was lost beneath layers and layers of a broken man.

“Come, there’s so much to be done before the ceremony!”

It was impossible to tell how Eddie could orientate himself so well in the dark, but he transported Waylon all the way back to the female ward. A crackly gramophone was playing an old song, something sung in a shaky male quartet about a perfect girl. Eddie hummed along as he laid Waylon down on a table.

“Oh, darling, you must have taken a tumble. Here, let me clean you up.” 

Eddie had replaced his knife with a rag, wiping at some of the nasty cuts Waylon had sustained during his mad chases. The rag was filthy, but Eddie didn’t notice.

As much as terror dominated his survival technique (or lack thereof), Eddie frightened him even more than all the horrors combined. Whatever had been done, it had thrust the killer to the other spectrum of crazy.  
There was a fine line between being on the gentle end of that knife.  
As sudden as being knocked over, he was being transported like a prize back to the female ward. He squirmed and tried talking reason, a grand feat of stupidity no doubt, but Eddie kept on rambling about the ceremony.  
Waylon froze in the enormous arms. At last it caught up to him. The bride. Darling.  
It couldn't be.  
How often did that question drag through his wrecked mind?  
It proved true. Eddie was handling him with delicacy and wiped at his injuries. A song haunted him in the background.  
"Eddie, please," he panted. His eyes took note of the door. "Things..are crazy here. We...need to leave. I need to get the fuck out of here! Please...you know I...I think you mistook me for someone. This darling you talk about..."

“Shh, shh, you’re all riled up from running around, aren’t you darling? It’s alright now,” Eddie tenderly took Waylon’s limbs, all individually, and tied them to erected posts to the left and right of the table. He took his time and in a macabre show of tenderness, took care not to cause Waylon any pain.

The room stank, to be perfectly honest. Blood had sprayed the floor, the walls, everything within a certain radius around the table. Body parts hung from chains like a grotesque butcher’s shop, and an anatomical ‘map’ of the male reproductive system sat on an easel for personal study.

Not that Waylon had much nerve to look around, what with Eddie looming over him and gently slicing open his clothing.

“Now, darling, I know you’ve had a long day, and I promise I won’t keep you up too long, but this is important. I will make an honest woman of you yet.”

Waylon’s struggled were laughable in the wake of Eddie’s strength. The old cellmate of his probably couldn’t tell his ‘bride’ was thrashing in his grip as he was tied down. It had forced out all the pathetic grunts and cries Waylon managed in his state.

That fleeting hope was crushed under the feel of rope tying him down.

Then, Eddie was slicing his old clothes, stained with soot, blood, and who knew what else.

“Eddie, stop!” He wiggled, and that was the best he could do. “Wake the fuck up!”

He had to sound firmer, if only to get Eddie to stop talking about the nonsense he was talking about. Had to get him to see some sense. Surely, he could, right?

“Eddie, I’m not a woman! What are you doing? Y...You have to untie me right now, for fuck’s sake! Don’t you see what’s going on,” his breathing was erratic now, so much so he believed he might hyperventilate, “they’re loose and-and going to kill, and we...out, have to get out…!”

Eddie moved the knife away, too aware that the thrashing might cause something very unfortunate to happen to his bride, and he couldn’t have that at all.

“Darling, here,” he held a mask over Waylon’s mouth and nose, spraying something ominous and green into it, “This will help you relax. I know you’re nervous, but please, get a hold of yourself. This is a delicate procedure.”

What else was the obedient bride to do but comply?

Ironic enough, it was a sleep his body had been craving and starving for. His limbs throbbed upon waking up, more than his head at least. He had vivid dreams of a brute with a charming smile stalking him, surprising him from behind.

It had been a terrible dream. Nothing more.

A scream sobered Waylon awake and he yanked up, regretting it when it pulled on his tired, bound muscles. Shit. Tied? He looked around frantically.

It was still hell, the living nightmare.

The cause of the scream narrowed his attention to a man, or what was left of one, flopping on a table that was turned red by blood. Layers upon layers of it. The man had a disfigured face, and his middle had a line, no, a gash that went down to--Oh, god.

“Oh, God,” Waylon choked on the words.

He almost mistook Eddie as a shadow. Those bright eyes revealed his position and the way he loomed over the near-corpse.

“E...D...Don’t…!” It was barely a whisper. Waylon lost his voice in the trauma of the moment. “Eddie...wha-don’t!”

Eddie didn’t hear the whispered cry of his ‘bride’ and it wouldn’t have made a difference if he did. He was trying out what exactly could work for his special one on these lesser beings. They were still beautiful in their own right, but just not destined for his love or children.

“I’m sorry darling, you are not meant for love. But know you died trying for it nonetheless.”

With a very solid, wet sound, Eddie leaned down on the blade he’d been slicing over the man’s body, separating flesh that had no business being in the shape it was.

The deformed inmate wailed, screamed, and died fairly slowly, after which Eddie pushed his lifeless body off of the table with a little annoyed sigh. Waylon was still in position on another, tied but not incredibly uncomfortably.

Waylon cringed, tried to turn away, but he still saw the deed corrupting his mind. It borrowed into his mind, cut pieces of his old life away, and made itself a niche forever when he’d close his eyes.

God, he wanted to throw up.

He didn’t remember losing consciousness again.

When his eyes fluttered opened, it was sound that had made him do so. He’d heard the slick, distant noise of flesh, which ended up being closer than he expected. No. Not again…

He lifted his head, weary, and looked.

This time, the victim in question faced the buzzsaw, whilst Eddie tiraded about the undeserving nature of this ‘darling’. 

“You’ve given up on love, and you’ve given up on yourself. Darling, you’re ugly now, and there is no hope for you. So bleed here, and die.”

The man whimpered as Eddie grabbed him by the back of the head, before screaming for only a second before the raw sound of the buzzsaw ripping through his face and skull screeched through the air. Eddie did all of this with an empty expression, perhaps a tingle of regret as he pushed yet another body off of his table. 

“They’re all the same, worthless whores,” he sighed and cleaned his hands on a rag covered in blood.

Fate was real. Maybe all these years scorning it earned Waylon her wrath. She mocked him, exposing in raw detail and odors what awaited him. It had to await him. He was no different than the men before him, save for his mental state.

Right?

He didn’t even scream when the man died. Instead, he welcomed the impending darkness.

And he should have stayed there.

Whatever part of him struggled to live, whether it be a willpower or genetics spread from his earliest ancestors, it didn’t matter. He should have not woken up.

He was strapped again to a table, splayed out. Naked.

He swallowed hard and woke up instantly.

He could hear the music playing again. Eddie. He had to be near by.

Testing the restraints, he shouted and bucked.

“Eddie! Eddie, listen to me…! Wait, please, you...you’re going to kill me!” He thrashed harder. “Fucking...shit! Eddie, fucking...LET. ME. GO!”

Eddie had been off in a side-room, preparing the dress for his lovely bride after making some adjustments whilst his darling slept. Now, he came back into the room, his footsteps heavy, but his expression almost tender. His bloodshot eyes travelled over the length of Waylon’s naked body, then stayed on his panicked face.

“Darling, you’re being vulgar. There’s no need to shout. I know it will hurt a little, but it’s necessary,” his hand stroked Waylon’s legs, danced over his inner thigh in a motion that was a mockery of loving to anyone but Eddie’s eyes.

“But think of our future. I want you to have my baby...you want that too, don’t you darling?” he looked at Waylon with genuine question.

Waylon’s mind fell blank.

He stared, terror and disgust churning into a new emotion that left him feeling chilled and boiling hot at the same time. This was...beyond depraved, beyond sick, beyond...anything he could comprehend.

He couldn’t even scream or shout his frustrations. It would only seem to amuse or irritate Eddie at best, or at worse agitate him enough to enforce violence.

“E…” Waylon licked his lips, gathered his voice. “Edd...Eddie….i...I’m not a woman. I...can’t...if...your baby?”

“Don’t you think I know that?!” Anger swelled in Eddie’s voice and he jerked Waylon closer to the buzzsaw, which was not yet on, thankfully. 

“That’s why I’m going to cut this all away! One quick incision and it’s done, and you’ll never leave me, and we’ll be happy darling! You and me, for all of our lives!”

Waylon couldn’t stop the shout of alarm when he’d been dragged close. He could see the teeth of the machine now, waiting, prepared to reduce him to a bloody pulp too easily.

How many had bled to death before him? Enough to know that Eddie didn’t live in the world of logic, at least, not one born from Waylon’s world. By the diagrams, it was too clear Eddie believed he would not only be groom, husband, father, but doctor as well.

“Wait! Just, yes, yes, wait...wait,” he forced himself to look up at Eddie. “I...don’t be angry with me...I’m…”

Not angry, not wanting to punch Eddie in the face, not wanting to run away.

“Scared,” he admitted, “I’ve...never...done this. I...never been with,” he flinched, “a man.”

The anger drained out of Eddie’s deformed face and he leaned closer, eyes searching Waylon for a hint of deceit. He found none, which softened him up a lot.

“Darling, you’re perfect. So sweet and innocent. I know it’s scary, but you have to trust me,” 

He took one of Waylon’s bound hands, leaning down to place a little kiss on the knuckles of it, “you have amazing bone structure and your skin...so soft. You’ll be beautiful, and I promise nothing will happen to our children. I’ll keep you safe, my love, my darling.”

Despite wrestling against every instinct, Waylon saw an alternative path for himself. Human nature kept him alive indeed. He almost wanted to laugh. Lisa would be proud to see how much he was manning up of all times. 

He cringed at the affection. Eddie saw him as someone from his past, he assumed. He wasn’t this darling and certainly couldn’t become a woman. 

Eddie believed otherwise.

So Waylon swallowed and nodded at him.

“Th...Then...you know you’re,” think, think, “going...about this the wrong way?” He spoke quickly as to not offend. “Look a-at this place. At me...I can’t...do this. I need a shower. I saw...I saw a bathroom with showers. If you do this when I’m still filthy, it’d...just be bad...it’s not a good way to start things off...right?”

He certainly got Eddie’s attention, and the so-called Groom looked at the stinking rot of the place. Flesh pieces, blood...this wasn’t right. This wasn’t where he’d make his darling whole. What a clever little pearl she...he was. Still a man, but already thinking like his future wife. Eddie gave a sharp little nod and went about undoing the straps. Right before Waylon could pull loose though, Eddie paused again.

“You won’t try to run, will you darling? You’re not a liar...you’re not a whore like those other filthy sluts,” he spat the insults in direction of a looming doorway from which a horrendous stench emerged.

“You promise to stay and love me, right darling?”

Waylon didn’t have to cast his eyes in the general direction of the room Eddie referred to. His imagination smeared a painting of not only death, but of its aftermath, of corpses left at stakes to warn others of what Eddie was capable of.

This must be the inmate the others fled from.

He found his voice again. “I won’t run.”

Fuck yes, his mind screamed, but no, he couldn’t. Not at this moment. He didn’t know where he was and Eddie overpowered him in too many ways.

“Look, j-just...untie me...and see. I w-won’t run. I just...want to get clean. Those other...men, tried to grab me, held onto my clothes. I still smell them. I don’t...I mean, a wife...wants to only smell of her husband...right?”

That certainly got the Groom’s approval and he went about untying Waylon entirely. He hoisted him up though, since his bride was entirely naked still and there were some nasty things on the ground. Pressed to Eddie’s chest was probably the last place most people wanted to be, but ironically, it was both the safest and most dangerous for Waylon.

“I understand completely, darling. Those filthy swines. Touching a woman against her will...is the most vulgar of all. I have no sympathy for such desperation.” Eddie’s gaze glazed over as he crossed the gym, the place from which the stench originated.

Strung up by their necks, a myriad of bodies hung from the ceiling, some still dripping festering blood.


	5. red

Most brides were cradled under the sparkle of stars or vivid blue sky. It was only fitting Eddie carried Waylon under a sky hand constructed and fueled by rage and disappointment. Waylon didn’t look directly up, and didn’t need to. 

He curled closer because it meant being farther away from their corpses and those inmates he could hear shuffling, screaming in the distance.

He was glad he could stay quiet, even if it was in Eddie’s arms, as he was taken to the showers. He would tense and bite hard on his tongue when he heard a noise, and upon looking around he’d see shadows. Hiding. Hurrying away.

Only those with a death wish seemed to cross paths with Eddie.

Waylon was one of them, unwillingly. 

He tried to ignore the fact he could hear Eddie’s heartbeat. It proved he was alive, a human, and it was easier to think him a monster, if a poor soul, turned this way by the corporation.

Waylon wanted to groan, weep, and vomit at once.

Instead, he looked up as they finally entered the showers. 

“Eddie,” he said, anxiety building, “what if...someone’s hiding in there? They’ll um...they’ll see me. Naked.”

“No one would hide in here, darling,” Eddie let Waylon down in one of the shower cubicles, wisely one far away from the window. It was right in a corner and free of blood. For now.

Eddie walked around though, checking every other cubicle before he turned his back to Waylon and stood by the doorway, the only entrance and exit.

“I know it’s rude darling, but I better stay here and keep an eye out. There are some true roughians in this place.”

A miniscule victory. Waylon took it. He was not strapped with his genitals about to be hacked, and he had a working shower. There was even a stack of unabused towels in a locker beside it. Desperate for cleanliness suddenly, he pawed at the faucets like a mad man---fitting given his location.

He had to glance back and note how Eddie kept vigilance rather than luridly peek at his bride to be. Were it not for the insanity, he’d almost make a decent groom.

Too bad the notion was as fleeting as the first squirt of water that splashed on him. He yelped, being the fool he was for turning it on full blast at cold. He quickly remedied it and then, just stood there.

He almost felt human. He stayed as long as he could under the water, letting it rinse him off blood, but not memories. It bought him time as well, allowed him to think with some clarity.

All his thinking gravitated back to the same, unsettling notion that he couldn’t escape Eddie. Not in his state. He needed to know where he was, find a way out, and then abandon the psycho to whatever fate the building would come to.

Maybe he was thinking too hard because his legs wobbled. He braced himself against the wall and then sank down onto the provided bench.

He hesitated, looking over at Eddie. The man just stood there with the air of a man protecting his cave. Like a dragon and its hoard.

“Eddie,” he called carefully, “I’m not...feeling so well…I know I’m asking a lot but given what,” god he didn’t want to think it, “what...will happen, I think some food could be in order. A vending machine or...anything in the cafeteria or the offices...maybe?”

Eddie turned at the sound of his name. His bride sure had a lovely voice and didn’t sound half as terrified as when he’d found him. Good. That meant he was calming down. And probably finally realizing how well Eddie could provide for his chosen. Waylon...His bride’s name was Waylon. He remembered the face, but he had no idea what they’d done together before he woke up.

Nevertheless, he was positive that Waylon was coming around to the idea, and surely falling for Eddie’s charms. He did look dashing after all.

The self-proclaimed groom came over with an armful of white fabric that he’d brought along before.

“Darling, I’m afraid I only have this for you,” it was definitely a wedding dress made from curtains and doctor’s uniforms, perhaps a strait jacket or two. 

“You must be famished from your run...Get dressed, and we will find you some food. Then, I can show you the chapel.”

Waylon stared at the garment, knew what it was before Eddie brandished it like a tool to win his coy bride over. Delusion of a new calibur, one that was bleeding into Waylon’s reality. A fucking wedding dress.

He couldn’t even bring himself to touch it.

“N...No,” then he recalled Eddie was a new awakened Eddie that was not to piss off, “I mean...I can’t. It’s bad luck. I can find...something else.”

He cleared his throat and stood, wrapping a towel around his waist and then grabbing a smaller one he dampened. He felt his entire body quivering. Seeing the dress made things too real. Or was it too crazy?

“I can’t...have bad luck...that’s, I mean...your children wouldn’t want that. Plus, you should...be sure it’s my size. You know, make sure my,” god was he really saying this, “measurements match it. I’d be,” a pause to regain himself, “embarrassed if you saw me...the first time in a dress that didn’t fit.”

He looked up at Eddie, hoping he didn’t look as terrified as he felt. He glanced at the towel, then shakily brought it up.

“Come here...let me, um,” he moved slowly, very aware of himself and hoping Eddie was too.

He’d temporarily turned down the dress, no matter the reason. He couldn’t let that decision let Eddie suspect anything, so he made himself gently dab at the blood and old rash on Eddie’s face.

“You...look very handsome.”

The dress having been rejected would have sent Eddie into a suspicious fit of anger, but Waylon’s touch to his face had him pause. There was no thought that accompanied the feeling of someone touching him carefully and his mind was ill-equipped to respond appropriately, which was why Waylon was somewhat turning his terrifying captor into a statue for the moment his fingers almost touched Eddie.

Wrapped in the white towels and cleaned of dirt, Eddie approved of his bride even more. Only when he’d stopped touching his face did the former patient come back to life. His mouth stretched into a grin that looked just about as comforting as a bed of buzzsaw blades.

“Darling, I made it for you. You were sleeping so long, I took your measurements. I know it was bold, but I did so anyway. But you are right. It would be bad luck to see you in it before we make that little change,” Eddie looked around, found a dead body in the bathroom close-by, and stripped it off quickly.

“These then. For now.”

Confirming there was less bodily fluids on the clothing than staining the bathroom, Waylon accepted the garments, relief flooding through him as though he’d never felt the sensation before. Another small victory.

He really had a chance here. Now he had to tread with it carefully and not get bold, the way Eddie was in taking his measurements.

He shivered at the image and pretended it didn’t exist. 

Now clothed and clean, Waylon knew sustenance was in order. He’d never outrun Eddie half-starved and fatigued. It also offered him an opportunity to prove he was not a runner. He didn’t move to step out until Eddie had, and even then, he had the sense to stay at the patient’s side, their arms occasionally brushing.

“I’m sorry,” he decided to say after much contemplation. “For running first. I was...well, you...were different than I last remember. I was scared. All these...other patients they’ve gone...sick and some want to eat me, others want to kill me, and then there’s others who I don’t want to know--”

He was rambling and shut up. He swallowed hard and kept his eyes on the shadows. He wished he had his camcorder.

“But...it makes me wonder why you don’t..want to leave this place?”

Eddie put an end to the awkward arm brushes by taking Waylon’s arm and linking it with his, being real gentlemanly about leading him onwards in direction of the cafeteria. The corridors cleared of other patients, they knew their chances with Eddie were slim to none. Even the twins kept clear of the Groom.

“Darling, I knew I’d find you here. Here is where our home will be, where we’ll raise the children, grow old together,” Eddie’s voice lost itself in fantasy, all the while the other hand, unoccupied with Waylon, twitched and flexed, desperate in its need to drive a knife into something living.

“Why would you want to leave? Are you lying to me? Don’t you love me darling?!”

Waylon forced himself to clamp onto Eddie’s arm instead of tear away and flee like he wanted to. He shook his head and used his free hand to rest on a strong shoulder that could knock him out with one hard nudge.

“N-No, that’s not it. I’m here...aren’t I? I could have run away.” He had to think fast, but he was hungry for fuel, not because he wanted to enjoy a meal. Pitiful how much like an animal he felt now instead of human.

“I...is it the best place to raise children? All those...things, all the blood...wouldn’t you worry about those?”

Eddie looked pensive at that. It was kind of ridiculous, this monstrous looking man judging his surroundings to be unfit for his imagined children, but for Waylon, it was a stroke of luck. Fooling Eddie Gluskin was a dance with death and Waylon knew very well what this psycho was capable of. 

“You do have a point, darling, but I think that will be a worry for the future. I know you’re eager to consummate our love, but there’s a few changes we must make before then, my darling bride,” Eddie had arrived at the door to the cafeteria, and he was suddenly much, much tenser than he had been. His hand actually found Waylon’s arm and squeezed in warning.

“We’ll have to be quick my love. There’s a fellow here I don’t much like. Fond of chewing on folk.”

Waylon went rigid if Eddie went taut. Another inmate then, worthy of exuding power in a hierarchy where power founded itself in deranged logic and depravity. He pressed closer to Eddie because, frankly, of the two, the Groom was the one who wanted him alive...mostly.

“What do you mean? He eats people? Are you fucking kiddi-Oh, God,” he turned away at hearing a sound, the suckling suction of flesh shredded and savored.

All thoughts of children and consummating flew out of him.

“I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Darling, that’s not very lady-like of you,” Eddie chided, unconcerned by the sound, but a knife in his free hand nonetheless. They would have to be quick, before Frank Manera picked up the scent of lost prey once more. Thankfully, they were close to a vending machine. Not that the food inside would be great sustenance, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Eddie smashed the glass with a well-placed kick, alert and looking for wherever the cannibal might come from.

“Be quick darling.”

Waylon obeyed, not out of his role as soon-to-be dutiful wife, but of a man desperate and stripped of raw essentials. Last thing he needed was to collapse from low blood sugar. So he was quick to gather all he could, stuffing them in a small pack he believed belonged to one of the bodies occupying the space.

He tried to act like he didn’t notice patches of skin missing from their bodies, not unlike a beast taking chunks for a meal.

A hiss, a growl.

Waylon hurried behind Eddie, gripping the fabric of his vest.

“What...if he follows us?” He gripped even harder when he picked on the noise getting louder. “Shit, come on, let’s go, come on…!”

Waylon was lucky he fit his role so well, or else he might not be able to seek refuge from one madman behind another. Frank emerged into a ray of eerie light, naked and covered in blood and dirt as always, beard streaked with leftovers and eyes wild with hunger. He gripped a bonesaw as he prowled around Eddie like a lion.

“Got something of mine, Gluskin. I want it back.”

“You will not lay hand on my bride, brute.”

Eddie was big, but so was Frank. This was a showdown of apex predators. The Groom squared himself, knife ready and eyes on the cannibal.

“Run, darling. Run fast back to our home.” he hissed at Waylon, before lunging for Manera.

Waylon had been so fixated on Frank’s raw hunger it had kept him frozen against Eddie. Then, sirens went off in his head, alerting him to fortune. He’d been given the go ahead to run.

Run.

He bolted.

He took the hallway they had, heart pounding like it would come out and run off without his body. Right. A left there. Shit, inmate. Back around. 

Where was he?

He staggered to a stop, breathing hard. Going right meant back to the nest Eddie had paved for himself, for...them.

He swallowed and went left, picking through obstacles. He needed to know where he was. He swore though as he made his way through, inmates were watching him. Had they recognized who he “belonged” to? Were they reluctant to near him when Eddie wouldn’t be far off?

Or maybe they were waiting to see him be caught.

He stopped.

It was so dark ahead. He needed his camcorder, and--

“Not smart, not smart.”

He spun around, eyes darting.

An inmate somewhere chuckled and then whimpered.

“They’ll tattle-tell. They’ll tell him. They’ll let him know where you are. Always. Always…”

Waylon stood a while longer.

Then, because of reasons he didn’t want to acknowledge, he was racing back, dodging obstacles and rushing past potential threats, seeking the safety of the female ward. He didn’t stop running until he was in the familiar sewing area, and there, he collapsed into a corner and pulled at his hair, and tried to control his hiccups.

Waylon was alone for a long time. It may have been just minutes or hours that passed, time was a wayward thing in the Mount Massive Asylum. But his solitary stay did not extend forever. 

A door opened, slowly, and a big frame passed through it.

“Darling?” Eddie’s voice was not nearly as loud as it could be, the distortion from the blistering rash on his face and lips worse than usual. The Groom dragged himself further into the room, a trail of blood dripping to the floor rhythmically.

“Darling, are you in here? Please, don’t make me worry, darling!”

The door had rattled Waylon from his misery-induced stupor. At some point he had eaten, mechanically, and then rooted himself to the spot, waiting. Waiting for strength? Waiting for death? He didn’t know.

He had began scrambling at the sound of the door, however, which hinted he had not given up on life yet.

It was no careless inmate though.

Surprising even himself, Waylon waited a few seconds before standing and facing Eddie. He gasped.

“Eddie,” he breathed.

Surprising himself even more, he came closer, hands reaching out.

What the hell was he doing?

He lowered his arms, took in Eddie’s state.

“You’re hurt...a lot…”

Eddie’s face lit up at the sight of his prize, one he’d earned by all means of his logic. It didn’t matter that Manera’s bonesaw had worked a huge wound into his side, his bride was safe and the cannibal put down. The filthy beast, he’d done some real sickening things to those bodies he ate.

The blood should be concerning, and so should the way Eddie had to lean on the nearest table. Still he grinned at his bride.

“You’re safe, like I promised, I keep my promises, darling.”

Waylon flicked his eyes up. Eddie was in a state of euphoria. He didn’t even register the pain?

All for his bride.

Waylon blinked out of staring. He couldn’t focus, couldn’t think with the sight in front of him. Of all times, this was the time. He could run. Eddie could only scream after him, probably even die.

It was so easy.

Yet, Waylon found himself standing, feet not inclined to run.

Maybe there was nowhere to run. Maybe fear overcame him, the fear that so much still lurked beyond. Maybe--

No, he couldn’t think.

He stopped thinking altogether and moved.

Shaky hands grabbed Eddie’s arm lightly, guiding him in and to the most moderately clean area in the female ward. That meant a plethora of fabrics and sketches of women in dresses. Waylon ignored them, and left Eddie as he struggled to remember that first aid he’d seen scattered somewhere.

There.

He crawled under the table, retrieved it, mind blank. He checked the contents.

Without pause he returned to Eddie and, despite the screaming voice telling him to stop, he was removing gauze and other equipment.

“T...Take your top off,” he said in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.

Eddie had let himself be steered to the area, confusion and distrust warping his face. Still the pain was beginning to register with the madman, and Waylon was acting...different. Much less terrified, much more dominant. Was his bride taking charge of her injured love? Eddie felt euphoria again as Waylon commanded such things from him.

He stripped off willingly enough.

“Darling, are you worried for me?”

Waylon lacked the vigor to look Eddie in the eye. His attention directed on the injuries, the worst being the side. He had to take in the sight of muscle. Something was wrong. Eddie looked packed with muscle, not sickly and ill as other inmates.

What the hell had they done to him?

His hands managed to still as he went to work, but he remembered the question.

“I’m worried,” he admitted, not elaborating on what worried him. He didn’t even know himself.

Once he was able to wrap the worst of the bandage, he moved to the rash on Eddie’s face. It was unsightly, haunting. He began to treat it without preamble.

“Eddie,” he managed to say in a low tone. “You don’t remember me, do you? We--that is, we were put in a cell together. By them, those...monsters that did this to you.”

“What are you talking about, darling?” Eddie seemed entirely detached from the reality of what happened to him, but thus was the case with mentally deteriorated persons such as himself in Mount Massive. Reason and ration were long since departed from this man.

“I think you need to lie down, darling. We are safe here, come, lay down with me.”

With the rash handled and the blood smeared clean off Eddie’s upper body, one could say he looked dapper. Almost human. Almost. The gleam in his eyes was unnatural as was his smile, and Waylon did well to remember that.

He’d pushed enough at Eddie’s good patience with him. So, with heavy reluctance, he orchestrated himself to stretch out, tense, beside Eddie, believing he wouldn’t do much. After all, they weren’t ‘married’ yet.

“We were,” he pressed. “I saw what they were doing to you. I tried to stop them and...they threw me here, wanted to kill me slowly. You stopped them once from doing that. You...really don’t remember?”

Eddie had no qualms stretching an arm over his bride and pulling Waylon tight against his large frame. He seemed far more content when he bedded his nose on top of Waylon’s hair, inhaling deeply and sighing with pleasure.

“Darling, you’re talking nonsense. I was never in a cell, not where I could have seen you...you must be exhausted. Don’t worry my love, sleep and rest, tomorrow your new life begins. Tomorrow, I’ll make you a woman and we can be as we were meant to.”

It was futile. Eddie wouldn’t let him pursue the matter, hushing him gently each time and chuckling about his exhausted state. Waylon worried still though. Had he dug himself deeper into Eddie not only be returning to their nest, but by tending to him?

That night, he slept with one eye open.


	6. Walk away from the Sun

All night Waylon gnawed on the idea that he’d been turned into a woman as he slept. No doubt Eddie believed it would be kinder to do it as he slept, but he had made no moves beyond touching his back gently, tugging him closer. The man was content.

So Waylon spent the remainder on the anxiety of delaying or stopping the procedure. He’d gotten so hopeful he’d even started thinking he could get Eddie to help him get out of here, using his bulk as he intended from the very start.

And then, there was that piece of him, that quiet yet strong bit of him Lisa referenced. That same thing that had made him stand up to that kid when he was in high school, that thing that kept him going when others might be sobbing in corners.

That same piece was wondering about Eddie. His mind, his soul, if he was still alive, still capable of being...saved.

Waylon shut his mind down when he felt Eddie stir.

His heart began its dance again, his palms sweaty. He hadn’t really come up with an epiphany. 

Oh, God he was going to die.

He sat up quickly.

“I need to check your injuries,” he blurted out before Eddie could greet him.

“Darling, you are an early riser, aren’t you?” Eddie obediently rolled to expose his side, the bandaging still in place and only minorly soaked with blood. Waylon had done too good a job fixing his would-be murderer up.

Eddie was watching Waylon, the eerie glow in his eyes lessened by the sunlight streaming in through broken, barred windows.

“You look beautiful in the light, darling.”

The sun, a mockery if there was one, the way its fingers reached in and caressed patches of Waylon’s skin. How close he felt to its warmth, and still so far. He longed for it but longing wouldn’t help his matters.

As he tended, he took some comfort in the distraction.

“...Thank you,” he said, satisfied his wrapping had done the trick. Perks of having a nurse for a wife.

Lisa.

Waylon shut his eyes. 

“About...that,” he went on, resting his hand on the fresh bandages looped around Eddie. “What if there...was a way you didn’t have to….take things off?”

Eddie was a slow riser, not so quickly roused in the mornings, and perhaps that’s why he didn’t fly into a rage immediately. Instead, he frowned up at Waylon, suspicion only at the very edges of his mind.

“Darling, we’ve talked about this,” they had had a million coupley arguments in Eddie’s head, “you are my bride, not my groom.”

“I know, I know,” Waylon was swift to assure Eddie, knowing the killer relied on it to keep his knife-hand steady. “That’s...Sorry, I’m just...had a fucked up few days. I mean, bad days,” he cleared his throat, aware that Eddie probably wanted his bride free of coarse language.

“I mean to say...it isn’t impossible for me...for me to be both. You made...a dress for me, and it’s beautiful, but I don’t believe you need to make...adjustments.”

He couldn’t believe what he said next, and it was easier to believe it was another version of him. “I worry you doubt...what our...our,” another clearing of the throat, “love can do. Have a family without needing to change things...that’s why those other ones weren’t your true darling, right? They doubted.”

It was one thing to play on the edges of Eddie’s delusional fantasies, but another to do as Waylon did and throw himself bodily into them. There was no ladder on this deep, dark well, and the software engineer should realize that when Eddie’s eyes clung to his face as if he’d never seen something more beautiful. There was a shimmer in them, as if the man might cry.

“Darling...Yes...you’re not entirely wrong,” Eddie sat up, got dressed, then stood, at once a mountain of a man again. He didn’t seem to need to eat or drink at all.

“I know I need to make sure the procedure is safe for you. Darling, you’ve inspired me!” he walked to his drawing board, sketching something quickly besides all the dress designs.

“I will make you a woman, after we marry. It’ll aid the conception, all the suspense and desire building up!”

Waylon paled. His lips quivered with a hysterical laugh in the making. Yet he remained quiet, pressing a hand to his head to assign his priorities back to survival, nothing more. Survive. What came later, he’d deal with then.

“W-Wait,” he said, remaining still where he sat, slowly perfecting the docile role Eddie seemed expectant of. “Conception, I,” he was dizzy, “I mean to say...you think I…”

It took longer for him to say the words, but he had to.

“What...just because I have what I have between my legs doesn’t...mean I’m incapable of conception. Things changed in here. It’s...I’m not the same, no one is.”

Eddie frowned at that, but he seemed to consider what on earth Waylon was suggesting. Was it possible? Could it even be? His logic didn’t supply him with an answer, and the mad urge to see his darling’s blood spill boiled ever so closely under the surface. He was truly taking his time, savouring this bride of his. But then again, Waylon was special. The special bride, maybe even the one that he could resist stringing up because she wouldn’t turn out to be a whore.

“Darling...that’s marvelous, but what of all your vulgar parts? They’re unsightly...don’t you want to be my perfect bride?”

Waylon knew he had to step off the precipice. It was not enough to fake the part of a bride, not now. He had to fall in head first and take on the personality of the bride, for his own sake. He’d have to climb out, and he knew he could, once this was said and done.

It disturbed him how fluidly his answer came out, without the hiccups and need for pause like before. Maybe the time in the asylum taught him things after all.

“I am how I am because of you,” he said. “Before, I was wandering around, lost and afraid. Looking for you. I thought you had left me. But then you were there, and I knew I was safe. It’s our love that’s made what I said possible. I know it sounds strange, but nothing else can have such a strong effect.”

Here, he slowly got up and clasped his hands tightly in front of him.

“They’re not there to...upset you. It rather...shows my interest in you and you don’t have to look at them during. I was made the way I look just for you. Just you. No one else. I don’t think that’s a mistake...darling.”

He was unable to elaborate and utter the word ‘conception’.

Waylon was diving so deep he was uprooting the foundations of the well. Eddie looked at him, watched their hands clasped, saw the truth of it in Waylon’s eyes. This was the moment he’d dreamed of, the one his favourite song spoke of, this was his pearl, his Bride.

“Darling, you make me,” he smiled, wide, just for Waylon’s sake, “happy. Yes. So happy.”

He crushed Waylon against his chest in an embrace that could easily kill, if he did not take heed of the delicate state of his to-be-wife.

“Then let us get married today. Oh, your dress. I cannot see it before the ceremony. Oh, I didn’t show you our chapel!” Eddie seemed full of enthusiasm and hooked Waylon’s arm into his, marching him down to a room behind the gym, so once more they passed under the rotting reminders of Eddie’s butchery.

The ‘chapel’ was a room well lit with two flood lights, set up with chairs in two double rows. In those seats, bodies were posed, headless, some missing pieces, all dead. At the front, the picture of a priest, and to his left, a previous bride, strung up with ropes.

“Ah, don’t mind her. She can be your bridesmaid.”

In a world where Waylon’s mind had deteriorated into a deformed state, he would have labeled the chapel as poignant. Details jumped out at him, bodies aside. Flower arrangements, hand crafted from paper, dotted the room, streamers had been strung, colorful compared to the usual drapery of the asylum.

Waylon wondered how many inmates had died for it to be made. Had Eddie gotten laborers and slain them should the flower come out crooked?

He breathed a little harder. He looked up at the alter.

Today.

He had saved his genitals only to propel himself into a new dilemma.

“What...happens after the marriage ceremony?”

“Darling,” Eddie chuckled as he adjusted the bowtie on a carcass of a portly man sitting to the right, throat slit and head tilted back, “don’t you know? You’re an old-fashioned girl, so I see, you’re really pure at heart. A real pearl, just for me. After the wedding, we’ll share in our love, and I’ll plant our legacy in you.”

He looked fairly eager for that part to start, the way Eddie stroked over Waylon’s arm.

“You’ll look so beautiful in your dress...I’ll be the envy of the world.”

Waylon felt the remaining color on him wash out. Share their love. That meant--No, he refused to picture it. He used his free hand and steadied himself on Eddie, of all things. It helped the room to stop tilting at least. A little.

“I don’t know about…”

That wasn’t the way to bring it up. He tried another approach after swallowing yet another lump.

“I heard it...hurts.”

“I think you’re worrying too much darling. Really, you’ll see, it’ll be wonderful, I promise.” Eddie lead his bride from the chapel again, this time bringing him to the sewing room’s attachment. Odd, alien looking pods lined the floor here, but there was also a rather strangely placed set of hospital wing curtains on rails. Like a changing room, they were position right around a sink, mirror and dresser.

“I’ll let you prepare here, darling, whilst I go gather up our guests.”

Waylon deflated into a state of numbness for the time it took to guide him to his dressing room. Only once Eddie was gone and his presence didn’t suffocate Waylon, he looked around. The dress, a mirror. He couldn’t even bring himself to step closer.

He did look in the mirror however.

He covered his mouth to conceal a gasp at what he saw. 

It wasn’t him.

He tore away and steadied himself on the sink, sucking in deep breaths. He’d jumped too deep without looking. He couldn’t do this. He…

That dress.

Finally he grabbed it, expecting it to burn through to his bone. It was lovely despite the stitchwork, a strapless piece. Bold given the mentioning of old fashions and trends.

He couldn’t do this.

He couldn’t.

Dress pressed tightly to his chest, unaware he was even doing it, he snatched up his camcorder not a room away, and ran. He saw Eddie, didn’t care, and ran right past him, not caring he had put himself in the killer’s bad graces.

“Darling?” Eddie had only had time to call out as Waylon tore past him. It only took two seconds for his anticipation to turn into deadly anger and his hands were not empty when he took off in pursuit of his runaway bride.

“You lied to me! You’re just another slut like the rest of them!” the accusations flew from his mouth, as did the curses as Eddie crashed around, chasing down what was inevitably his to kill.

The curses spawned wings on Waylon’s heels. He never knew he could move so fast, leap so high, and dive around corners with such precision. Maybe he’d never known terror until this moment.

This time, he keened on more things. Alert, he picked up on new ways to escape. He leapt up into airway ducts and wiggled through, Eddie’s girth too wide to fit. He tore through rooms, ducked by inmates, and hid in spots he knew Eddie could not reach or fit into.

And for all his running, he was no where near the exit. A bolted door, a locked chain. Someone sabotaged him every new way he might escape.

He didn’t know how long he’d been out of breath, but it had been a while since he last heard Eddie. Maybe the psycho had given up on him, moved onto the new darling.

Then, he heard it.

He was covering ground like the madman fit to be here. Eddie hadn’t given up at all, but relied on patience if it meant finding his whore of a bride faster.

“Ah!” Waylon exclaimed at spotting an elevator open and a ladder across.

He leapt through the space, crashed into the ladders and clung for dear life. He didn’t notice letting go of the dress. 

Something was toying with him, spitting in his face.

The bars loosened.

He slipped, and-

His scream echoed in his mind. Pain spiked through him with every heartbeat, turning the volume of his pulse up to a deafening state. His ankle. It was broken and his right side burning with cuts and scrapes.

No, no, he could still-

He cried out and collapsed to the ground. He couldn’t walk. He looked up.

Eddie.

He was coming down the long way.

He was done for.


	7. Here comes the Bride

Waylon didn’t know how he bothered. Somehow, he had dragged himself up after rolling in agony for a few moments. Maybe the impending doom kept him conscious. Something did. Guilt? Rage? Sorrow?

All the above maybe.

Eddie was coming for him now. It was a matter of minutes.

What had he been thinking? Running hadn’t helped. He had gotten lost, a mouse in a never ending labyrinth constructed around obstacle around obstacle around deranged killer.

So this was it. He had no paper to write to Lisa, to tell her not to let them see his body.

Somewhere in his final thoughts, he pictured old memories with difficulty. It was another lifetime, but they made him smile, at least those he could recall with the most ease.

His eyes lowered.

He saw the dress.

The dress…

Humans often took drastic measures without thinking, and even in retrospect the reasons were not always revealed. Waylon had to have had one of those moments, because he didn’t want to die, not yet.

In a rush, he stripped himself and, at long last fulfilling some twisted irony, stepped cautiously into the dress.

It fit.

He wasn’t Waylon anymore. He didn’t feel like it nor would let himself believe it.

He was the bride, a crumbled mess on the ground again, bloodied and with broken bone. Only the dress of all things shone bright in its white glory, his dress.

Eddie approached, directly ahead.

Waylon braced himself and scrambled into the corner, clutching his injured leg.

Then, Eddie’s manic glaring gaze was in view, armed with teeth and blade. Waylon knew he had to start talking now or have his throat slash before he had the chance.

“Darling,” Waylon panted, breath broken. He didn’t break eye contact as he shook his head at himself. “You found me…”

His smile came so easy, as though the bride had been dormant within him all this time, another version of himself waiting to bloom, the version of himself that could endure and survive this place. Survive Eddie.

It was a coy, playful smile, if a bit strained. He laughed gently, and indeed hysteria lined it, but then again, it underlined all laughs here.

“You’re angry...I knew it. I shouldn’t have played chase with you. I just...I had jitters and wanted to see if you were true for me, true to find me...no matter how hard I hid, no matter if someone took me away from you. I’m glad you did.”

He clicked into the role efficiently by now that even his gestures matched.

“Still, I was unfair to,” he struggled to stand and had to lean against the wall, “you...if you’d just let me have that one error. After all, for all I’ll do for you...the...having your child. Your legacy.”

He didn’t even know if it was a conscious act that he rested his hand over his navel, the ‘womb’ for Eddie’s seed to grow. A desperate bride’s reminder to her future husband that her body would carry his child and it should not be harmed.

Fatally, anyway.

Waylon’s unintentional choice to bring the dress along for his futile attempt to escape might be the singular reason that would have him survive the next five minutes. Eddie filled the doorway almost entirely and the knife he clutched in hand had ended countless lives, as the gym proved.

The deranged groom said nothing at first, but he came over at a slow, dangerous pace as his ‘bride’ gave him the excuses she could think of. Whether or not it was the truth was yet to be determined, but Eddie wasn’t inconsiderably angry about it.

“Darling, I was so afraid you were turning out to be a slut just like all the others. Wanting to leave me! Seeing other men! But you’re not like that, right darling? You’re my pearl,” Eddie stood right before Waylon now, looking down at his injured form.

“And you hurt yourself in your foolishness. Oh darling, why would you do something like that to yourself, to us?”

Waylon recognized the treacherous waters when he waded in it. Just as he knew that modicum of delight still layered under Eddie's wrath, of seeing his bride in full dress.  
Don’t look at the knife. Maintain eye contact.  
"I did it for you," he said, "so you'd see I meant what I said. So you'd believe I wouldn’t run away like that."  
Eddie was closer now. It proved a feat to reach out with his free hand, gently take Eddie's (one without the knife), and lay it over the hand he had on his navel. Eddie's hand dwarfed his own.  
"There is only one man for me. One husband...one father of our children."

Waylon was smart to handle Eddie the way he did, because the Groom’s deadly rage faltered under soft touches and implications of impending fatherhood. His hand stroked where it touched Waylon’s stomach, feeling how soft a place there’d be for his child to grow.

“Oh darling...you do the silliest things,” the knife wandered into a pocket, and Eddie lifted his bride, tutting at the state of Waylon’s leg.

“Let’s not wait another moment. I’m just dying to prove my love to you, and now I know how eager you are...look at you, you even took your dress. Wanted to scare old Eddie a little, didn’t you? Darling, you’ll be the death of me yet.”

Waylon grunted as Eddie swooped him up like a proper groom. The knife was out of sight too, but far from out of mind. Waylon behaved himself by looping his arms around his groom's neck, head resting on a big shoulder.

Death of Eddie.

He should have been angry that he couldn't fathom bringing an end to Eddie's life.  
He swallowed and distracted himself with what was to come.

"I'll finish preparing. Just a, ah, quick clean up and leg bind. What of the guests you mentioned?"  
Were there really going to be guests?

“You want to look presentable, I understand. Your bridesmaids will help you,” Eddie carried Waylon all the way back to the little niche in the female ward in which he’d left him alone last time. The ‘bridesmaids’ in question were definitely dead. Except one quivering variant, who held a veil in his grubby fingers. 

“Don’t be late darling. I’ll wait for you in the chapel. Come in when the music starts!”

Considering if the live variant was better than the dead ones required too much effort. Waylon expected there were more live ones under Eddie's whims. Witnesses to the union.

Once more he was left to his preparation, and this time he didn't flee. The variant whispered and grunted as it tried to help, to which Waylon shoved him away each time.

His leg bound and pain clouding his head, he stood and looked at himself.

He didn't see Waylon.

He saw the bride.

No plan struck him. Nothing but the same thoughts rolled through him and renewed his nausea.  
He had to keep the role to survive. He needed Eddie. It wasn't even a matter of logic anymore. True or not, he was gradually hooking himself to that notion.

Music streamed through.

Waylon's breath hitched. The variant supplied him a crutch. Silently he took it and, true to his promise, went to the chapel.

He was due to marry.

Eddie stood at the altar, another nervous variant to his right with a sheet of paper in his hands. Probably the vows the Groom had written for himself and his bride. Eddie looked all sorts of excited, even wearing a shirt (sewn together with coarse black thread) that didn’t bear any spots of blood.

Their audience was a mixed assembly of living and dead guests, all of whom were dressed according to Eddie’s deranged fantasy. Some of them began to hum ‘here comes the bride’ along with the music the old gramophone spat out.

“Are you nervous darling? Me too,” Eddie took Waylon’s hand, then nodded to the variant dressed as priest.

Nervous didn't begin to label the insanity and severity of this sham. No, it wasn't a sham right? This asylum existed in a plane of its own caliber.

Everyone here viewed it real. Eddie saw it as real and Waylon had to immerse himself in his role if he planned to not die prematurely.

It felt real. The soft fabric of his dress, the touch of Eddie's hand on his, the distortion of the wedding song.

Waylon had craved secretly something beyond the mundane hadn't he?

"Yes," he whispered, staring at the poor variant.

The ceremony began. Images of his wedding to Lisa snuck in behind periodic blinks. Then she was nothing but a scattered memory.

And then the words that bound him.

"I do," he said, without hesitation, without a flinch.

Eddie beamed a delighted smile at him, uttering the same words with jubilation in his voice. The ‘priest’ proclaimed them husband and wife and urged Eddie to kiss his bride.

“This is it darling. Oh, we’re going to be so happy together,” Eddie took Waylon into his arms with a hefty little tug, and covered his lips without hesitation. 

Waylon's eyes widened as his body went taut. He caught himself quickly and orchestrated the relaxation of muscles until he was leaning into Eddie's embrace.

The kiss worked into his brain however. It wasn't fierce and demanding as he might have thought. Rather, Eddie poured his affection, delusional or not, into it.

He'd never been kissed this way.

Gently he pulled back, hands on Eddie's chest. He felt a shiver dance through him. This was it.

"My husband," he said.

It would disturb him later that it didn't sound bad to his ear.

“Come, darling,” Eddie took Waylon by the arm, leading him out of the chapel amongst the terrified applause of the more dead-than alive audience. Apparently, everyone was happy enough the Groom finally had a bride that would occupy him for sure.

“I promised I’d make an honest woman of you, my darling wife.”

The room he brought Waylon to was cleaner than the last ‘operating’ room, but the buzzsaw table was there nonetheless. This time, there were only restraints for Waylon’s legs.

“It won’t take long. I’ve practiced for you my love.”

There it was again. The Bride stripped off him momentarily and hid as Waylon viewed the device.

Now was the time to man up, literally. All his tentative role playing would be put to the test.

"I know you have," he began softly.

He looked up at Eddie.

"But if you would humor me...if I could show you I could still be your bride and that they're not vulgar. "

He reached up and with trembling hands, cupped Eddie's face. With the tense rash, he did look far more handsome. That made things a tad easier.  
"You've done much for me. So...let...me take care of you as a wife does."

Eddie didn’t quite know what to make of the situation, watching Waylon on the edge of maybe leaving this mellow mood. But the wife aesthetic was certainly working some magic on him.

“Darling, you’re quite eager, aren’t you?”

He took Waylon by the hips and lifted him onto the table.

Waylon couldn't stop the gasp as he was hoisted by the hips, and if he grimaced, he played it off as a product of his injured leg making light contact with the table.. He managed to grip Eddie's shoulders to brace himself and ground him in the possibility he was skirting castration.

The buzz was too close by.

Shame had no place in survival. Waylon lacked the vigor and mental stability to consider how he might feel after all this, if he survived. Could he live with himself for submitting to debauchery and obscenity? Was it really human instinct to survive if it meant struggling to live with yourself with the things you had to do in order to accomplish that?

Waylon didn’t want death just as he lacked the trait to end any inmate’s life. That’s all he knew.

Lightly, he touched Eddie's face again, tracing his features. He felt human. Flesh that could shred, bone that could crack.

"I want you," he began, "to try to love me as I am...if you'd just let me show you they're not vulgar but...also for you."

His lips quivered, his disgust mounted but had no place here. Eddie was the bride’s husband, and a wife pleased her man. Right?

Waylon revved up every ounce of his courage and drew Eddie closer, mouth to mouth, chest to chest. 

It was good thing he had not eaten recently or might have lost his stomach right then and there. He focused on Eddie, on rebuilding the bride’s role around the pulp of what was left of Waylon Park. The bride had experience with sex, in its most diluted sense.

That was another matter entirely, one that would have Waylon cringing were he fully aware of himself; he’d long since had fantasies of a co-worker or the man painting their house. It was an extension of those fantasies since he was a teen, and they’d never extended beyond a quick session with his hand in the shower.

Now, his curiosity manifested in a serial killer, a psycho so long gone, and yet maybe still human. Maybe, somewhere deep under the layers of abuse and delirium.

Maybe.

Waylon only hoped the soft sounds that escaped him, his trembling breath, the soft gasps (fear), passed as something akin to longing or coyness in a virgin bride. He guided one of Eddie’s massive hands down his thigh, which was hidden under the gown. Then, once at the knee, he guided it under, millimeter by millimeter. His skin was smooth here, shaven to appease Eddie’s quirks.

“I promise,” he said against Eddie’s mouth, not thinking how repulsed he was by his acting, “I could teach you to love every inch of me, just as I for every inch of you…”

All of his bride’s little noises and motions were doing the right things to convince Eddie of the genuine nature of this situation. By all accounts, Waylon was willingly putting his hands on him, trembling and eager and being as any bride would on her first night. His pearl, his wife, how precious that trepidation in her eyes was, how adorable the nervous taste of her lips.

Eddie took it in stride, and his hand claimed every part of skin it explored. The smooth inner side of his bride’s thigh was in particularly pleasing and the Groom’s kiss intensified as his fingers traced along the matching underwear to the bridal gown. 

“Darling,” he breathed against Waylon’s sweet little mouth as he gathered up the billowing skirts of the gown, exposing his bride’s legs enough for him to squeeze his body between them.

Waylon’s stomach caved when the Groom gently thrust himself between the spot a groom was expected to be the eve of his wedding. The cry that flew off his tongue was real, and it was a distorted blessing that the sounds of distress matched the sounds of pleasure.

He no longer had to guide Eddie’s hand, so his own clung to the fabric of the vest, the gloves offering weak protection against the heat radiating off the Groom. He was a conductor of heat and rage, just as he was one for adoration and affection.

And his affection twisted Waylon up all terrible ways inside. The deep kiss had him squirming, but there was also the feel of the damn underwear on him being fondled. He had no plans for it to come off if he could help it.

“Wait,” he breathed in between a kiss, tilting his head back to look up at Eddie. At this rate, he was going to be losing all his clothing, and as much as he despised the dress, he rather have it on than off. “Like I said…”

He licked his lips and cleared his throat of hesitation. “You’ve...done much for me. I can...return the favor, and then you can go and rest, yeah?” To elaborate, his fingers gradually went down, down, over powerful muscle and resting right below Eddie’s navel. 

“Darling, what are you talking about?” Eddie was all the more ready to remove every layer from his bride, to push into a warm place just for him as he had promised Waylon over and over again. This pearl of his was still so shy as he did not know just what lay ahead. Perhaps it was time for him to take charge now, to be the man and assure his wife he knew what he was doing.

“Relax, darling, and let me love you, as god intended us to love each other.”

Not that Eddie truly held any idea of god existing, not after his youth of horror. 

With a strong little jerk, he shed Waylon’s underwear away and his hand palmed over the vulgar bits of his bride for a moment, until they responded and showed every eagerness his shy bride wouldn’t express.

The loss of clothing and the force of the jerk had Waylon cry out and push against Eddie’s chest, a futile effort since the Groom seemed incapable of sensing such weakness. Lack of bodybuilding, trauma, and less than nutritious food had ensured Waylon loss that one there.

He grit his teeth then bit hard on his tongue until he began to taste metal. Eddie’s hand cupped everything he’d dubbed as vulgar. Whatever hope, ridiculous or not, he had grasped onto after that leap into the abyss, it was lost to him now, replaced by something wicked, sharp, and worse than anything else he’d felt before.

It didn’t matter that he’d heard of cases where a rape victim got off during the assault. It didn’t help to think of his family, not at that moment when an amalgamation of terror and abhorrence took over everything; he felt his body responding, indifferent to the protests of his mind.

He didn’t know when he’d half fallen back on the table, propped up by one elbow while one hand grabbed Eddie’s arm hard, though it did nothing to stop him.

“S...Stop…!” It was hardly a gasp, and his twitching thighs and hips eclipsed whatever shout he threw the Groom’s way.

Eddie’s touches did not take pause at Waylon’s flimsy protest, not with the way his body responded so nicely to the stimulation. His bride wanted him in all the right ways, there was no chance Waylon was lying and this wasn’t wanted. Right? Eddie’s fantasy painted him a beautiful picture, a honeymoon in a wonderful resort, just he and his bride and their future together. 

The Groom gave a blissful sigh as his fingers traced over the place he’d soon enough push into. Warm, tight, and only for him.

“Darling...darling, relax, relax. I know this will be your first time, you’re such a good girl....untouched and unsullied. I’d never hurt you, darling,” unless of course, Waylon would try to run or leave him, but so far, he’d proven almost loyal.

Waylon had a moment of defiance when his leg cramped up, ready to kick Eddie in the face. He didn’t, and the reason behind that was one currently too buried under the weight of the impending trauma mounting in Waylon’s mind.

Denial swept over him again, like he was being struck down by Blaire’s men all over again. This wasn’t happening, he was trapped in a dream, and any moment he’d awake with a start and roll over and see Lisa sleeping peacefully next to him.

When the nightmare didn’t end, and instead intensified with additional probing and touches, he tried to tear Eddie’s hand away. At best, it looked like he was only encouraging Eddie. His voice had abandoned him almost entirely, only the beginnings of protests and curses starting and then dying on a choked sound.

Eddie was saying something.

Waylon realized he was looking up at the ceiling and forced himself to look down at Eddie. Was this really better than being mutilated? Than death?

He had to breathe.

“Ed...Eddie,” he forced out, gripping that vest tightly again, “I...I can’t do this, I’ve never...I’m scared.”

He hated himself more just for admitting that.

Stretching Eddie’s patience thin was as dangerous as provoking his wrath. Waylon had to watch himself and he had to watch the Groom for signs. Such as right now, as Eddie looked less blissful with anticipation and his good eye flashed with unavoidable, impatient anger.

“Darling, you’re going to have to be a grown woman about this. There is nothing to be scared off. Unless you think my love is something to be feared,” Eddie’s grip was on Waylon’s neck, and it was tight in the way it forced the bride to meet her newly-wed husband’s eyes. They were growing dark with wrath indeed.

“Don’t you love me, darling? Do you fear me?”

Waylon grunted and clung to the hand at his neck. Where the touch had been hungry with the fervor typical of a groom deflowering his bride, it was now the grip brimming with violence of a groom who would kill his new bride for her cheating ways.

That, more than the previous touches of affection, rattled sense back into Waylon. The kind of sense that fit Eddie’s logic, that kept him alive to...what?

He carefully shook his head and cracked a feeble smile. He didn’t break eye contact as one hand traveled up Eddie’s arm, touched his face, then canvassed down to where Eddie’s arousal took on a literal form. It made him want to recoil his hand, but he kept it still.

“No...No, you wouldn’t hurt me on purpose,” he said, and knew it in a way to be true. “I only meant...the table hurts my back, is all. You know I’ve never been touched. I’m...n-nervous, is all, but in a good way, right? I’ve never seen another m-man.”

That appeased Eddie enough for him to loosen his grip on his bride’s neck, instead covering Waylon’s mouth once more with a kiss that could, maybe, in another situation, steal one’s breath in its sheer passion. The Groom was a lover, more or less. He killed out of love, however twisted and horrible that may look to an observer.

And he would have Waylon here, on the table where countless men had died.

Eddie’s hand worked pretty fast, didn’t take the common courtesy to loosen Waylon up. Whether or not he was male in Eddie’s current fantasy didn’t matter, because Eddie wouldn’t afford him such patience either way. Instead, he undid his pants, releasing what would no doubt lead to pain on Waylon’s end.

“Now, darling, relax,” Eddie hissed against Waylon’s neck where he was mouthing at the skin, nipping, licking, claiming his bride over again.

Before Eddie had unleashed a plethora of ‘affection’ on his neck and collarbone, Waylon had caught a glimpse of what was to come. It burned in his mind, left him speechless a moment until a hard suck on his neck left him hissing.

They had done something to Eddie. He was big in every aspect, from head to toe, and if the strength he’d exhibited before was any indication of his love, consummating it would be another level of hell.

“D-Darling, hold on,” he said, then checked himself by pressing kisses, erratic, sloppy and virgin like kisses, to Eddie’s mouth. This was going to happen and running this time would end his life. 

So he had one last plea. “You need...something, for it. It won’t just fit...or it’d hurt, wouldn’t it?” He couldn’t sound like he knew what he spoke about. A virgin, the kind on Eddie’s fantasy, wouldn’t. 

Eddie didn’t have the patience to keep reassuring his bride. Sure, that was a little vulgar of him, but one couldn’t be a gentleman until the end of time, no one was that patient.

“Darling, don’t be afraid of pain,” he muttered as he hiked up the skirt of the dress, pressed Waylon’s legs apart and slowly rocked himself into an entrance still too tight to allow him in. Eddie half-closed his eyes when he managed a few inches. Finally, finally as one with his darling!

It wasn’t pain. Pain implied tolerance, that with willpower or a short amount of time it would ebb. This wasn’t pain. It was agony, and it began in the midst of a warning to stop. This time it stripped Waylon of his ability to speak entirely.

Bursts of that agony shot up his spine, bending his back, making his head thunk back against the hard table. One hand had a life grip on Eddie’s arm, or wrist, he couldn’t tell, couldn’t remember any time before this feeling.

He didn’t hear his guttural cry, or the broken sounds that filtered through him with the slightest movement the Groom made. He felt like he was suffocating from the inside out, and no amount of breathing could calm him down or stop it.

Maybe he cried out Eddie’s name, trying to plea, to beg, but he couldn’t hear himself say anything beyond the start of the killer’s name.

Eddie didn’t hear the pain in Waylon’s voice. To him, the broken cry sounded like pleasure. Maybe, if the Groom had not lost himself in his fantasy of a wedding night, he might realize how familiar the hurt in his bride’s voice was. He would have stopped in horror if he considered that Waylon did not wish for it.

But that was not the case. His bride had expressed, repeatedly, how much she wished for this between them, to share in love and life and this was part of it. Of course it was a little painful, first times always were. Eddie carefully tugged at his bride’s head when Waylon got too close to the sawblade. The Groom sent his beloved a delighted smile, still slow in moving his hips, letting Waylon adjust for as long as Eddie had the patience to remember.

“Darling, you feel good. So good. Do you like it? We’re one, you and I, finally, together.”

Eddie’s voice oozed between thumps of Waylon’s heartbeat and the savage rush of his blood. He couldn’t answer though, losing himself in every raw detail of their union. He hardly felt Eddie adjusting him to avoid the saw’s teeth, as it only made him cry out further to be moved at all.

But they were just as easily cries out confirmation for the Groom, and the way Waylon scratched down Eddie’s arm could be interpreted as delight, an impatient demand for more.

His breathing was coming harder, and slowly he could find pieces of himself among the chaos. Eddie was hardly moving, and struck Waylon for only a moment that the Groom was allowing his bride an adjustment period, unaware it would never come.

With the room tilting in his vision, Waylon’s eyes dropped on Eddie’s face.

“E...Eddie,” was all he could say.

“Yes, darling?” Eddie was a loving groom, albeit an insane one. He allowed his bride to calm down, supposedly for ‘her’ to get used to the new stretch as he held himself steady. Never would he force himself upon anyone. Not like those bastard brutes he once called family, not like them at all.

“I’m afraid I will get a little impatient, darling, if I do, tell me,” by all means, this delusion of a loving wedding night was lodged so firmly in Eddie’s mind, he hardly registered the fact his bride was male.

Waylon was halfway on the table, his legs hooked over Eddie’s shoulders almost. 

If Waylon had the ability to, he would have laughed at the sweet words. He doubted that Eddie would stop after all this, and even if he believed this was consensual, Waylon lacked any power to say otherwise.

He grunted as his legs were hoisted and meant deeper penetration. His hands leapt up and clawed at Eddie’s shoulders now. He was looking right at the killer’s face, and saw nothing but bliss. He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, and not in the same way he mutilated men for his love.

Waylon weighed the blame on his own shoulders, despite how strong the urge to curse at Eddie was, how much he wanted to kick him away and run again.

But because he did neither of those things, he held on tighter and let his head fall back again, eyes shutting tightly. It’d be over soon. Eddie would be satisfied with one round and let him curl up and ride out the agony until it, too, would pass.

When he squeezed his thighs against Eddie’s sides, it was the closest thing to consent, but also a means to brace himself and not let himself slip further into the madness pain could bring.

But some measure of Waylon’s pain translated itself through his body language, so obviously even a blissful Eddie could understand and see it. His bride was trembling with pain, not pleasure. The grip he had on Eddie was agonized, not desperate and pleased. Eddie frowned, looked down, saw his bride’s vulgar parts almost soft and very abandoned. 

This wasn’t what he had in mind for their first night. At all. Eddie was determined to have Waylon enjoy this too, so his hand wrapped around what offended him most about his bride, a soft, firm stroke that he repeated whilst he held his hips still.

“Darling, don’t be so brave...I’m here to love you, so let me love you. Forever and ever.”

Waylon’s eyes shot open at the attention. His body jerked in response again, as if desperate for a distraction from the intrusion. Maybe because it was starved for anything but pain, it seemed to react that much quicker, and with an attentive lover like Eddie, it accelerated the process that much faster. 

Eddie did something with his thumb, and it brought back Waylon’s voice.

“Eddie…!”

He gripped a thick wrist, his harsh pants coming softer now, while his legs relaxed around his husband.

That was the trick. Eddie smiled to himself with satisfaction. His bride’s vulgar bits had prevented him from truly enjoying the union with his husband, but clever Eddie had solved the problem so very quickly. Nothing stood between them, and Waylon looked wonderful now as he lost his breath to moans. Eddie’s patience extended a little and he continued, rubbing, stroking, his other hand steady on his bride’s waist.

“There we go, darling. That’s the way. You’re relaxing now. It feels good, right?”

Any doubts about his bride’s loyalty had gone. He had never done this before, so he couldn’t be a slut. No, Waylon was a truly good, old-fashioned pearl.

Waylon was indeed moaning, and the few grunts that punctuated it the last remnants of his discomfort. If he had been dizzy before, he was whirling now. He closed his eyes, mind narrowing on the touch on the parts of him Eddie had once dubbed vulgar.

He’d detached from himself, the Bride taking control, as ‘she’ was suited for this position better than he was. And to endure was one thing, but to find something that didn’t equate to pain turned him into a mess, like a pup that had been so used to abuse that finding a touch like this now meant there was no more shame to be had, no pride to keep him from being quiet.

It hurt, but there was sparks of delight now, and it was making him betray his earlier protests by rocking his hips this way and that, somewhat unwillingly pressing into the touch and grunting out Eddie’s name.

Yes, this was by far more like it. Eddie dedicated his right hand to Waylon’s genitals, the other kept his body steady as Eddie resumed fucking him. It was an odd, bittersweet sort of coupling, and the world was silent around the two. The Asylum, usually so eager to disrupt by surprising Waylon with another horror he didn’t expect did nothing right now, the world fading until only Eddie and Waylon were alone in it.

Eddie worked his pace up, found pleasure in Waylon’s hastened panting, and he knew he had control of everything. This was far more like the perfect night he’d had in mind all along. 

It wasn’t far off, the sweet finale of this all. Right before he allowed his bride and himself release though, Eddie leaned down to Waylon’s ear.

“I remember you, Waylon Park.”

As arduous and traumatic as his time in the asylum had been, and how difficult it was to escape it, it proved equally easy to forget it all. He truly was an animal, like the inmates, who at one point submitted to their urges, whatever they be; he was loud, his former, repressed life no longer shackles in that moment as he and Eddie indulged in a sick ritual.

Sick or not, it touched something feral inside him, that same feeling that had made him stand up for Eddie. It must have been the same thing that kept him alive. Whatever it was called, it had him spreading his legs wider, because Eddie angled just right and the pain blew into a flurry of sweet feelings that made his voice bounce off the walls.

And it felt forever he could do this, let himself be depraved and as sick as the others if it meant prolonging something beyond pain and fear.

Then, just before release claimed him, Eddie spoke, and his eyes snapped open again.

It was too late to stop himself from screaming Eddie’s name, and to a god he didn’t believe in.

Waylon’s voice bounced off of the walls, echoed through long hallways and past endless corpses. Mount Massive was a world of its own now, and Eddie made it his married home. Waylon was his now, fully, mind body and soul and nothing could convince the Groom otherwise.

When they’d both calmed down sufficiently from their respective orgasms, Eddie continued to be gentle in bringing his bride to what could barely pass as a ‘bed’. Sure, the Asylum had plenty, but most were covered in unsightly stains or blood. Sometimes both.

“Darling, get some rest now.” Eddie dismissed what he had admitted to Waylon as he tucked his bride in full dress in with a grubby blanket, “You’ve had a long day. Tomorrow begins the rest of our lives.”

Waylon had heard right, hadn’t he?

Maybe not.


	8. Paid in Full

Nothing held much sense in the aftermath of their coupling. He’d fallen so deep into his orgasm he hadn’t felt Eddie dislodge or pick him up. He recognized colors and shapes passing by, and smelled the smell that could only be Eddie laced with the musk of sex.

A bed, that much he knew. He was so tired. He blinked slowly at Eddie, unable to appreciate he had spared himself another death, that he might have made the first move in convincing Eddie he didn’t need a woman to reach his goal.

But that was for another time.

‘Rest’ tumbled lazily in his head, and Waylon let his eyes shut.

-x-

Waylon slept deeply. No nightmares shook him awake or tried to devour his soul. Neither did his family haunt him. So when he awoke on his own, he could believe he wasn’t in the asylum.

A few blinks, a registering of pain, and he let the moment of frustration, anger, and everything else wash over him.

He paused, held his breath.

He peeled back the blanket. The dress. The ache in his back and legs, and not from the broken one. For a while, it was hard to breathe, and he tucked into a ball for as long as it took to slowly shed himself of what had happened, of how he’d fallen and become what he had.

It was to survive. It had been necessary.

He didn’t sound convinced.

He might have just stayed there forever when a scream jostled every fiber of him. He bolted up regardless of the pain. He listened.

Another scream. A voice.

Eddie?

It hurt to stand, and even with the crutch, he throbbed all over. Steeling himself and biting his tongue, he keeps moving toward the source of the sound like the madman he was becoming, instead of running as he would before.

He knew it was coming and still it wrenched his insides.

“Eddie!”

“Darling! You’re awake.” Eddie greeted his wife with a dazzling smile, chilled only by the fact he held onto a rope that now held a struggling body in the air, dangling amidst the corpses of those that met their end here before this unfortunate soul.

The Groom was still at work, punishing the ungrateful sluts, now more invigorated that he had found the perfect bride. All these other whores needed to be strung up for their behavior.

“Did you sleep well? You looked beautiful,” Eddie tugged the struggling body a little higher.

Waylon stumbled against the wall. His head bumped against the wall, lending his gaze to the bodies hung like ribbons, with one in particular fluttering wildly. He was out of that moment, that sickening moment he’d let himself be a part of.

He had to shut his eyes and gather himself before he hobbled over as quickly as possible and used a free hand to grab Eddie’s arm.

“I slept fine,” he answered, having the foresight not to ignore Eddie’s questions. “Eddie! Let him down, you...why are you killing him? Please, let him down.” He couldn’t show loyalty with the inmate though, and he felt like a coward for having to add, “What did he do? Did he try to hurt you?”

“No, darling, but this slut deserves to hang,” Eddie didn’t like how Waylon seemed to stick up for the struggling body that was becoming more limp by the second. The complicated ropework slacked slightly as the weight of the fresh corpse stilled.

“Why would you care so much? Have you been seeing men behind my back?!”

Waylon had just about enough of the madness, and maybe because he was tipping toward that side of the spectrum anyway, his face hardened and he gripped harder onto Eddie’s arm.

He didn’t really know if it was himself speaking or that Bride in him. He rather not know.

“I care because you awoke me with his damn screaming! I’m allowed to care just as I’m allowed to be insulted you dare accuse me of something like that after...after…”

He trembled, mostly with rage that had once been fear and disgust. Turning away, he managed to equip the voice of an insulted wife.

“No one’s ever done that to me, and you’re so eager to call me a slut. I don’t like it. It stresses me out,” and an idea came at him head on, “and you know what the doctor says about stressing someone out who’s with child.”

“Oh darling!” Eddie let go of the rope, causing the recently killed body to crash down on the ground, bones breaking in a wet crunch and blood oozing everywhere. Not that the Groom noticed, with the way way he now wrapped an arm around Waylon and nuzzled his bride’s neck.

“Are you quite certain that’s possible? There’s nothing I want more. I will be such a good father, you’ll see. I’ll never let anyone harm our children. Never!”

Waylon either played the part of deranged bride well, or had become a textbook case of semi-multiple personalities. Or rather, he was going crazy himself. The repercussions of that didn’t affect him yet anyway, so it made it easier to endure Eddie’s nuzzling.

“Our love can accomplish anything,” he said, not daring to look back at the state of the fallen inmate.

He turned in Eddie’s arms and cupped the cleaner side of his face. The rash had lessened and the injury to his side must have not gotten worse because Eddie didn’t favor it at all and Waylon saw no more blood staining it.

“So don’t...do that. You don’t have to do that anymore. I know you’ve been hurt...badly in the past, but I’m here now. They can’t hurt you anymore, Eddie.”

Eddie stilled at those words. How could Waylon possibly know of the nightmares in his head? How could he know about the voices, the faces and hands of the past, the ones that hurt him with no mercy?

Because he was his love. Waylon knew these things, because their love bonded them so deeply. Eddie wondered if he’d ever loved anyone so much before. Someone who understood and wanted him and held him.

The Groom felt an overwhelming urge to kill every man and woman in the world, just so he’d be forever alone with his darling wife, his perfect bride.

“Darling, you always know just what to say. You’ve got old Eddie wrapped around your pinkie finger, you minx.”

Waylon liked the sound of that, enough that it pulled a tiny smile out of him. At last, traction in his wake. There was hope burning in him.

Eddie looked at him so openly, not unlike a child. Waylon felt he should be remembering something, but such was the case when so much else took precedence. Getting the fuck out of here was at the top of the list, along with handling Eddie if they both had to leave together.

“I’m your wife,” he confirmed. “But now…”

He exhaled and rested a hand on his forehead.

“I could use food and water. And then...we need to discuss something.”

-x-

Ironically enough, Waylon’s wishes as Mrs Gluskin seemed the most important thing in the world to Eddie, because he brought his beloved to the staff kitchen, where the fridges had not been plundered and food much more sustaining than vending machine snacks awaited Waylon’s greed. Even Eddie ate something for the first time in his wife’s presence, though it was only after Waylon had stared intently at the sandwich.

It was kind of serene and horrendous at the same time. The beeping of phones off their hooks filled the distance, the moans of variants still on the loose echoed in the halls. All of it was normal to Eddie and he thought of nothing but sweet home when walking the grubby, bloody halls of the Asylum.

“Darling, what did you want to discuss?”

Waylon didn’t ignore the detail to attention and the seemingly innate need to please Mrs. Gluskin. Fate didn’t favor him, he reminded himself. This had been born out of his own flirting with insanity and will alone. He could just as easily fuck it up.

He ate decently, then shamelessly. He’d stuffed himself full, realizing how weak he’d been without food.

But the time to enjoy the momentary peace--and strange, he believed Eddie wouldn’t harm him--ended, and Waylon prepared for another obstacle.

He got up, mindful of his bum leg, and peered out through the gaps of the bolted and barred windows. He recalled seeing firetrucks at one point, and the lack of response informed him something serious had been going on, in a bad way.

Only now he pulled it back to the forefront of his attention. He had the notion they weren’t letting anyone out alive who saw the insides of the asylum.

“They’re going to kill us,” he said. “You’re strong but you can’t stop them all. They want to hide what happened here, they’re going to burn it down, Eddie. Don’t be angry with me when I tell you that I can’t, that we can’t stay here.”

He turned and faced his husband.

“What will they do to me if they catch me, Eddie? To our unborn child?”

His wife might know how to sweet-talk him, but he was also incredibly capable of ruining Eddie’s good mood. Agitated, the former patient looked out of the window, as if he had not contemplated going outside for a long, long time. He couldn’t remember what the outside world even looked like, or how his former life had been. Eddie Gluskin’s life was a pale shadow of a memory, nothing more.

But to think that someone should want to harm his wife and child? Unthinkable. Unacceptable. Their faces would bleed should they dare to show themselves to Eddie. They’d hang, they’d all bleed and die if they dared to touch his wife.

“You want to leave? But this is our home!”

“I know,” Waylon said, surprising himself with how easily he could touch Eddie now, as if he had moderately tamed a wild beast. He couldn’t get arrogant though and have the maw on his neck now.

He smoothed his hands over Eddie’s chest, then drew them back fast when last night flung through his memory. Checking himself, he coaxed himself to take Eddie’s hands and breathe through the memory.

“You did a lot making it a home, but now it’s not safe.” He paused and looked down at those large hands. “If you’re afraid, remember that I’ll be with you. We’ll leave together. We have maybe a few hours to...enjoy this home before we’d have to leave.”

He couldn’t stay. He knew they were coming.

And, disturbingly, it seemed wrong to let Eddie meet a fate like that.

“It’s another world out there, a world I know. You took care of me. I can do the same for you,” he said. “So please…”

He lightly scratched the back of Eddie’s neck and drew his head down a little. “Come find a new home with me, Eddie.”

Eddie didn’t like the thought of turning his back on the place he knew so well. But Waylon wasn’t wrong about the future of Mount Massive, and Eddie was, for all his layers of psychosis, not stupid. He saw the men with machine guns, he heard them arrive by the truckload. And although their numbers had not been enough to conquer the Asylum, they were as replaceable as wheels on a truck. There’d be more, and more, until his home was burned to the ground. 

His wife, his clever, clever wife, had the foresight to wish to leave this place behind. Perhaps they’d find a new house by a lake, somewhere far, far away from the horrors of people. Eddie liked that thought. 

“Darling, anywhere can be a home if we make it so,” he nodded, drawing Waylon to his chest.

Waylon deflated against Eddie for a few moments. He was tired, inside and out, and at last he could breathe a sigh of relief. He was getting out of here. With Eddie as a bulldozer, nothing could prevent that.

He caught himself lingering too long, listening to a heart that was very much beating on its own. He drew back, placed his hand over it, felt it meet his palm in normal intervals.

Heat still bled into him. Eddie never got cold. Like last night--

He shivered and lowered his hand. Try as he might, the memories weren’t going to leave him alone. Just another thing to haunt him.

“You can go enjoy it a little longer,” he reminded, pulling back enough to meet Eddie’s gaze. Still content, a man in wedded bliss. Waylon almost envied him. “But listen to me, when we get out there...it’s not like here. You’re going to have to listen to me, and I know you’re a good husband and want to take control, but…”

Eddie needed control, one way or another, something to confirm he wasn’t that victim he seemed to forget about.

“But you can be a husband in other ways,” Waylon added quickly, “when we’re alone. I’ll make it up to you then. Is that alright?”

“Darling, you sound a little ridiculous,” Eddie dismissed the subtle suggestion entirely, and Waylon would have to work a lot harder if he wanted some measure of control over the psycho he had hitched his wagon to. Still, Eddie was a man in a mellow mood, made content by marriage and a wonderful, shared night with his wife.

“I can handle the world outside. And I can see it in your face you want to leave now. So let’s leave now. I’m always eager to please my love.”

Waylon knew there was a new chapter of trouble ahead of him, of them now. It wasn’t just him. He was bound to Eddie, in every way possible it felt. He’d dug himself this deep, and should cut his losses, but he knew just as well he couldn’t.

Maybe he was as weak as others believed after all.

He made sure to find his camcorder, inspect it, and confirm it held the secrets to bring the corporation down.

It was time to get the fuck out.

-x-

There was little trouble getting to the entrance. That concerned Waylon. He’d been tense when they departed, expecting inmate or a barrage of armed men with weapons. Neither occurred, but they could hear sounds in the distance. Gunfire? Crackle…?

A fire.

Waylon had paused by a window and saw fire.

He pressed on faster, Eddie at his side, matching his limping pace.

Then, the men.

He shushed Eddie gently with a signal and approached the gate. A man lied dead on the floor, naked, and looked as if he was crushed in half. Men with guns studied him. 

Deadly forced was announced over intercoms.

Waylon looked at Eddie, nodded, and forward they went.

The entrance, however, was empty.

Waylon almost laughed at spotting the open doors, the mouth of the monster he’d fallen into. They were almost there.

A grunt had them stop again.

“H...Help me…”

Waylon tensed, unconsciously drawing a hand out to keep Eddie at bay. He made a gesture that Eddie should stay quiet and hidden in the shadow as he approached the figure. And paled.

“Blaire…”

The bastard laughed meekly, his body prone against the door.

“C-Come on...don’t look at me like that...help me...please. Let’s help each other out…”

Waylon swallowed, glancing at the door, then at Blaire. He stepped closer, intending to get a better angle of--

He didn’t see the blur that was Blaire. He fell back, was grabbed by Blaire, and it took him several heartbeats to register the funny feeling in his stomach was from the stab wound he’d just been given.

The sound that left Eddie was nothing short of a roar, and it could have come from any wild beast and sounded less threatening. It took the Groom maybe two seconds to cross the room and rip into Blaire. He didn’t even use a knife, he just picked the suited, slimy fuck up by the neck after breaking the arm that dared wield a blade against his bride.

“You fucking swine bastard whore! How DARE you!?”

Eddie snarled, didn’t even recognize Blaire as one of his own tormentors, completely blinded by the rage of seeing someone hurt what he considered his. With a strength and savagery more commonplace among wild bears, he ripped at Blaire’s neck, blood spraying him, the ground and Waylon, until Jeremy Blaire gurgled and found his end, drowning in his own blood. But Eddie wasn’t finished, pummelling the broken body long after death.

Waylon saw the world in splashes of white and red. He’d fallen to his side and stared blearily at the end of Blaire, unable to help but think how desperate the man was to keep his work under wraps. The world faded around the edges though, and the temptation to finally let himself go overwhelmed him.

Then his gaze noticed Eddie.

He stepped back from death and pressed a hand to his wound. For a moment, in his own flash of madness, he thought of the unborn child he was to wield. He shouldn’t have, but he felt a pang as if he had lost it just then.

They had to go.

There was a rush of noise he couldn’t decipher. He looked up, trying to call Eddie’s name. Instead he groaned, misery rushing through him as a throb in his entire body. Guns.

“Don’t move!”

They were about to open fire.

This was how it ended?

It didn’t.

He heard it before it came. A phantom’s shriek, a rush of dark smoke, and before he processed it, blood pattered down on them as a soft rain. He looked up. The smoke he saw wasn’t there.

“E...Eddie,” he panted, clawing at the ground and pushing up to a crawl. “Eddie...we…”

Against all odds, he stood.

Eddie had done nothing but squat down and curl up when he felt the static touch of the Walrider. Too many nightmares were made real by that feeling, and never had the voice of the phantom reached his mind, no matter how much Eddie prayed for it, if only to end the torture of the engine. 

So when the Walrider came, Eddie Gluskin turned six again, small and terrified and so terribly hurt.

He didn’t feel the phantom leave, or the gentle patter of blood raining from broken bodies smashed into ceiling and wall. All he heard was the voice of his father, his uncle, the shutter of the camera.

Waylon forced his vision to clear enough to inspect Eddie’s situation. What he found had him drag his wounded, fatigued body over before he’d realized he’d done it. Eddie was curled into himself, absolutely petrified.

The thing. The rush of smoke, it had been something Eddie knew about and it triggered something.

Shit.

He should have left right then, let Eddie to his own devices. It wouldn’t be his guilt if Eddie stayed there to get shot down, right?

Waylon looked at the door, down at Eddie slowly.

Damn all of himself; he got on his knees carefully and touched Eddie’s hand gently.

“Eddie,” he rasped. “Eddie...it’s me. There’s nothing here to hurt you. Remember? We need to leave.”

He should be limping away, leaving all of this behind as a trauma to be dealt with at later months.

He needed to leave Eddie. He was dangerous, a killer, obsessed, delusional, a soul not worth saving.

He was a victim.

Waylon wrapped his bloody fingers around Eddie’s, squeezing. “Can you look at me, Eddie…? See that I’m telling the truth?”

Not that Eddie could appreciate what kind of lunacy Waylon was displaying by dealing with him rather than running to freedom like any sane person would. All Eddie knew was that his father and uncle were in his head, watching, always watching and laughing as they hurt him. He saw his mother cry, helpless, weak, a woman too scared to help her own child, too frightened to protect the only son she had.

But through this entire nightmare, this ordeal and devilish, neverending cycle, there was the voice of his darling. It deafened him with its beauty, punished his father, his uncle, his mother and cradled him, safe, rested a tiny, innocent Eddie that never had known the feeling of being loved and protected.

It was enough to pull Eddie from his stupor, and to have him look at Waylon with question and lingering confusion in his very bloodshot eyes. Why were they here? Not dead? The pools of blood explained what happened to the men with guns, but not how.

Eddie didn’t care. His darling was bleeding too, and from the stomach. If only he could recognize which flesh pieces belonged to Blaire, Eddie would set them alight with pure hatred alone.

“Darling...the baby!” he gasped, arms shooting out to carry Waylon. And this time, they truly did get the fuck out, because Eddie carried his bride into the golden light of the morning sun before the Asylum. Birds sang out here and a gentle breeze caressed them. As if nothing was wrong at all. 

The world was indifferent to their plight and the horrors of the asylum. It thrived and continued without them, whether or not they were in it or not. Waylon’s body felt the rush of fresh air in and out of him. It was real air; they had made it.

They.

His gaze dragged to Eddie, who carried him down the entrance pathway, stride after stride. They were outside, but Waylon couldn’t stop looking at Eddie, recalling the face of terror, of vulnerability. Amidst all the horror the asylum had thrust at him, something in Eddie’s broken expression had frightened him the most.

It was like seeing him all over again under the abuse of doctors, of being forced into the engine.

Waylon choked on his words and pressed harder on his stomach. 

“I’m so...sorry, Eddie,” he panted.

But it was fleeting in the wake of hearing something unworldly buzzing in the distance behind them. Waylon sobered up, putting aside his emotions, and looked ahead. There, he directed Eddie to a jeep, where he bullied himself into the driver’s seat with Eddie’s assistance.

Once Eddie had gotten in--and yet again he had the opportunity to speed on out of there--he started the car, crying out in delight when it started. He had his camcorder set to the side, and when he looked ahead, he saw the smoke returning.

“Don’t look, Eddie,” he said.

He snatched his camcorder, hesitated, then zoomed in.

He swore he saw the thing take a man’s shape and saw a camcorder like his own in its hand, watching them.

He shoved the camcorder aside, put the jeep in drive, and broke through the fence and out of there just as the darkness overcame the asylum.


	9. No Rest for the Wicked

They were out, but they weren’t free.

Waylon didn’t think it was possible to feel more paranoid than inside that fucking place, but how wrong he’d been. He stuck to the isolated roads that curved through land left to the wild. He’d never been good at physical stuff or being the cool guy, but he was smart and relied on his memory to take him toward a lonely road that he remembered leading to a lakehouse.

It was one of those vacation homes. Logic told him so and as the jeep rolled over pebbles and stonework, he exhaled at seeing it was indeed empty. Windows were bare, providing a view of furnished home. Not bloody, clean.

They weren’t free at all. Anyone could be with Murkoff, looking for him. He couldn’t take the risk.

Plus, he was wounded, hurting, and there was the serial killer psycho he had just unleashed to the world.

Fuck.

Waylon hobbled out of the jeep, having parked it in a secluded area. He expected Eddie would follow so he kept quiet as he patted around the ground by the door, and found a rock that held the hidden key. Thank goodness.

He cast a look around then stepped into a room that was void of the asylum’s madness, but he didn’t trust any shadows. Wounded or not, he instantly hopped around, hand on injury, tearing at curtains and turning on every light, even when he was groaning with pain.

Eddie had been surprisingly quiet on the drive, staring out of the window at a world he was no longer in touch with. Leaving Mount Massive was a thing he could never have imagined, not when he was sane, and certainly never since.

Yet here he was. At a lakehouse. It seemed almost like a vision from one of his daydreams (he hated sleeping) and once he stepped out of the car, he circled the house. He never went inside.

Instead he stood at the shore of the lake. He liked the look of the water, inky black and deep. It promised to keep his secrets, and he could already think of new ways to involve this place in more punishment of sluts.

During one episode of shoving curtains aside, Waylon exhausted himself and leaned against a large window. He startled at a person at the lake. It was no ordinary person, but Eddie, looking contemplative. That couldn’t bode well from the mind of a psychopath.

At the least, he believed Eddie wouldn’t leave, not without him, so he reluctantly pulled away and dragged himself around until he found a few first aid kits. The home was well stocked. He’d been favored for once.

He didn’t miss the dress as he stepped out, and he managed to tend to himself, managing a few curses and muffled screams in the process. The wound had gone in cleanly, and didn’t seem to have punctured anything.

So by the time he was fully wrapped and found a cane to handle his injuries, he expected Eddie to be inside. He wasn’t, and he groaned, no rest for the weary.

He felt himself on the verge of a breakdown, but he pressed on, waddling outside until he could see Eddie, so out of place.

“Eddie,” he called, tired. “Come inside...it’s getting cold.”

Eddie didn’t respond, turning from the lake only to watch the deep forest that surrounded them. In a comical sense, he might seem like a guard dog, trained to hear anything and anyone approach and meet it with deadly force. His knife was still with him of course, but it was the last piece of the Asylum that he held onto.

“Darling...it is...quiet here. So quiet. They’ll come. It never stays quiet.”

It was easier to maneuver in sweatpants than a dress, so even though it pulled on his aches, Waylon didn’t stop until he approached his husband-watchdog. They couldn’t linger here long, he knew that, but it seemed a worse option to press on and pass out at the wheel or be pulled over by someone under the guise of officer when really they were part of the corporate mother’s greedy offspring.

“I know. We need a moment to rest...get ready. Looking the way we do, we can’t go on.” He grunted and touched his stomach. “I’m hurt, Eddie. Come inside. No one is going to take you or hurt you. Please...come inside. We’ll leave soon.”

The reluctant lunatic gave a grunt, stalking inside the house with little trust. He didn’t get all too far though, stopping for a long moment in the bathroom. He was staring at the mirror, touched his face, the unsightly rash, the bruising under his bloodshot eyes. There were certainly more handsome grooms to behold.

“Darling, why didn’t you tell me I look a mess? Does it make you happy to see me so beside myself?” It seemed that no matter what Waylon did, he would always be under the Groom’s judgement, and key to his affectionate and wrathful sides.

“Do you want people to laugh at me when we go out? Why would you do such a thing?!”

Waylon had followed him, wary of the Groom adjusting to his new surroundings. Of course it wouldn’t go smoothly. He flinched at the tone, but didn’t let it deter him from approaching. He learned early on that cowering away only agitated Eddie.

“You looked worse,” he said, taking in the still healing rash, the scars he couldn’t wipe away, the bruising. “Don’t take that tone with me, Eddie. It’s not your fault...those bastards back there did that to you, not me, so…”

He huffed and tugged on his own hair. He breathed in deeply, ignoring his still impending fear.

“I’m sorry. Come on. A bath will help. I’ll...clean you up, okay? I would have done it earlier but I was busy being stabbed.”

Anyone observing the scene would have to admit that Waylon had lost a piece of his sanity along the way. Offering to bathe the psychotic takeaway he’d brought from the asylum? Not the smartest thing in the world.

And not something Eddie would allow either. He narrowed his eyes down at Waylon, but didn’t draw his knife. That was a good start.

“Sorry, darling, but there’s things a man must do.”

He walked around Waylon on his crutch, finding the door to the shed attached to the side of the lakehouse. Eddie gave a delighted little sigh as he walked in, surrounded by potential weapons in the guise of tools.

Waylon almost wept and laughed and screamed at once when Eddie marched past him. It took him a moment to limp after him, and when he did, he didn’t need a good look to understand what Eddie intended on doing to break into the new home they’d found.

“Eddie, wait,” he stood at the entrance, though he was hardly an obstacle. “We have to focus on leaving, we can’t...you can’t start that now. We’re not back at the asylum, anymore. Eddie...Eddie, listen to me!”

He grabbed Eddie’s shoulder, trying to turn him around.

“I’m not going to let anyone hurt you!”

“Why do you keep saying that?!” Eddie snapped at him, hand around Waylon’s throat immediately and gripping tightly enough to lift him off of his feet a few inches.

“No one can hurt me! Not even you, you arrogant slut!” his other hand grasped for something, found a hammer and held it up to Waylon’s temple.

“Stop talking like you can do anything! I’m your husband! You’re mine! No one will touch us!”

Waylon knew the instant right before Eddie snapped at him he’d fallen into arrogance. Just because he’d convinced Eddie to leave, to spare his genitals, and found him refuge didn’t alter his role as wife.

A wife was dutiful to her husband, not bold and demanding of him.

He choked on his own cry, clawing at Eddie’s hand. He nodded as much as he could, finding it harder to breathe with each passing moment. The hold was pulling hard on his stomach and making him see spots.

“Okay, okay,” he croaked out, “I’m sorry for...God, Eddie, I think I’m bleeding again...please...It hurts.”

For a moment, the grip intensified, Eddie’s eyes filled with the deep lust to murder his wife and punish her for her wrong-doings. But eventually, the desire seeped away, and the hammer buried itself in the wall besides Waylon’s head.

“Damn it darling, you always make me do things I don’t want to! You need to behave.” he let go of Waylon, immediately putting the hand that had been strangling on his wife’s stomach.

“The baby...is the baby okay?”

Waylon couldn’t answer at first, sucking in all the air he could and rubbing his bruised throat. Another ring of discoloration to add to his mottled skin. He froze upon Eddie’s hand on his stomach, for an instant convinced he was going to punch the wound to punish him for his insolence.

When he didn’t, he softened and remembered the phantom child.

To say it was gone would ensure more deaths, maybe his own.

Carefully, and nervously, he rested his hand over Eddie’s.

“It’s...it’s okay. The knife didn’t hit it. As long as I’m careful, it’ll...it’ll be fine. You’ll have your legacy.” He swallowed and still wondered how someone could switch between violence and concern so rapidly.

What had he done?

“Can we compromise?” he asked. “I won’t interrupt your work, but at least let me be a good...wife, clean you up, give you new clothes. I’d like that...to pamper you first.”

Eddie considered it for a long, long moment. Perhaps there was some truth to Waylon’s wish. A good wife was supposed to take care of her husband, and his pearl was trying, wasn’t she?

“Alright darling. Perhaps I was a little rash. It’s just that I worry for you, you know that right? I love you so much.”

Rash hardly justified the assault, but what did justice know in Eddie’s world. He’d been exposed to brutal environments that consisted of torture of the most invasive type. Funny how memories jumped at the most inconvenient times; Waylon had picked up documents along his way and now he recalled the dread of the engine select inmates were subjected to.

He clamped down on the deepening memory and poured himself into a new task. 

There was familiarity with jumping from one trauma to the next. Not comfort, but familiarity all the same. Even now he had yet to thoroughly process the reason for his lower back aching, of the fact that--and as ridiculously insane as this was--he had the best sex of his life on a table where men had been mutilated and bled dry.

He was gray in the face by the time he got Eddie to strip while he started a bath. It was one of those massive tubs that required a step to get into, and it anchored itself along a window that overlooked the water.

These people were well off, and unaware they were harboring a psychopath and his bride, who was not so much psychopath but certainly not stable. Who knew the severity of the mental state he’d be left in when all was said and done.

If he ever got that far.

Wayon stopped mulling and tangling himself in those thoughts. He focused on the trickle of water, on the way Eddie looked stark naked. He’d never seen the Groom without some garment and his face went pink. It was the most color he had on him in days--not including the blood and splotches of bruises.

Now was the worst of times to remember last night. He turned away, looking at the bath and hungry for one himself. He wanted to rid himself of the asylum’s lingering scent, of Blaire’s hold on him.

“Easy,” he said, gently of course, as Eddie was allowed to slip in.

He was just reaching for the soaps when the water became suffused with pink. If nothing else, it confirmed Eddie’s superhuman abilities. The injury to his side was already scarring. That engine must have been the culprit.

Waylon watched him a moment, studying him for signs of agitation before he finally extended his hands and dragged the suddy loofah along Eddie’s upper back. Questions long since buried, some even forgotten, began clawing their way to the surface of his mind.

Best to not irritate Eddie at the start of a bath when he was still fresh from an attack on Waylon’s neck. He kept quiet as he bathed his husband, taking the most caution when dabbing at his face and applying a soap with healing qualities to the rash-infested side of his face.

It wasn’t unlike washing a kid. Eddie seemed pleased at the attention and how thoroughly Waylon scrubbed almost every inch of him. Well, pleased in the sense that he wasn’t throttling Waylon at least.

When he reached a particular area between Eddie’s legs, he stopped and withdrew his hands, unsure. So he waited, his other hand stroking up Eddie’s arm, caressing his shoulder to keep him calm (hopefully) as he waited expectantly for direction.

“Um…”

Eddie hadn’t known the kind of care Waylon afforded his psychotic husband at any point in his life, and thus, didn’t know how to respond to it. At all. It certainly felt nice enough, the soft touches and careful way his wife handled the loofah. Waylon would be a great mother, tender, warm and loving.

Eddie had chosen well for himself, and he should probably remember that more often. Oh, this wife of his, drove him both crazy and terribly weak. Love was indeed a crazy thing.

“Darling, your blush looks adorable. Is it that impressive to see your husband nude?”

Blush or not, it did not empty Waylon of the force and danger lurking beneath Eddie’s muscles. Nudity hardly changed that. If anything it agitated the bride, bombarded with last night’s fresh memories. In a slew of bloody and painful memories, last night, even with its agony at parts, eclipsed most others.

“Yes,” he said breathlessly. He forwent the genitals and went on to lightly massage soap in Eddie’s hair, which seemed incapable of being ruined despite his violence circumstances.

“I’m still new to being a...wife.”

He was very, very cautious in tilting Eddie’s head back and rinsing the soap from his scalp. Eddie could just as easily snag him and hold him underwater until death finally got its grip on him.

But he still had questions pestering him. They had to leave soon, but he was spent, and he had to begin planning for what was to come in regards to Eddie. Leave him to the police? Some would die restraining him, and others eager to cast him into a new asylum. It just felt wrong.

He was touched with madness himself, to put this psycho above his own family.

His family.

Waylon shut that chapter of his life momentarily. He couldn’t risk those thoughts now.

“So that’s why I’m curious,” he went on, the bathing done and his hands now massaging along Eddie’s scalp, down his neck, along his strong shoulders. “Darling...do you remember anything before you woke up? The life before you started looking for me?”

Eddie had leaned back in the tub, looking up, watching Waylon touch him with little restraint. And to think this pearl of his had been running away from the very sight of him not long ago. It brought a smile, from ear to ear, to Eddie’s face.

“Darling, why do care about that? I was asleep, a long time. Before that, I had the sweetest of lives, just like Leave it to Beaver. You know that, don’t you, darling?”

Waylon didn’t cease in his ministrations. He pulled a face at the old reference and knew instantly such a life had been fabricated in Eddie’s mind. That nagging pull at his mind came back, as if he needed to remember something from the asylum, a clue or something. But when he had a full plate as it was, he let it go and decided to revisit it when they had the time to relax.

Relax.

That word took on a whole new meaning, where it meant not being strangled or hounded by a psycho.

“I care because I’m curious,” he said. “I like to know about you. I remember more of...my life before I woke up.”

He shifted around the tub, sitting on the lip carefully so as not to aggravate his own injuries. 

“You don’t remember that man? The one that did this,” he touched his stomach, “he didn’t just hurt me. He...he hurt you too.”

“I don’t,” Eddie frowned, as if the mere subject was to his displeasure. And it was. Pressing him into remembering anything he’d shut out from his plausibly traumatic past was a sure fire way to get into his displeasure.

“Enough about that. You’re prying, darling. A man must have his privacy.”

Waylon’s heart sank low. For a moment he had been stupid enough to believe that he could unearth a piece of the old Eddie from a single question alone. Delirium and pain from his injury must have made him desperate to hope he could have changed things so easily.

Sensing the irritation, he forced himself to loosely wrap his arms around Eddie’s shoulders, disregarding that it got his shirt wet in the process.

“No, no...you’re...right.” Don’t get angry, don’t upset him, not now. “He’s gone anyway. You protected me.”

He almost added that he would return the protection, as it sounded like a wife-like thing to include, but he went cold. A memory rushed at him before he could speak, a glimpse of the night before where he’d heard Eddie.

He had said he knew him, said his name.

Hadn’t he?

He gripped Eddie’s shoulder a little more rightly, not out of affection, but to steady himself as the urge to demand what Eddie had said overwhelmed him. He was sure he had heard what he heard. Right? Had he been so deranged to understand properly?

It didn’t seem to matter. With Eddie as he was and their current location, he couldn’t ask. He valued his throat.

“I hope the bath helped...you can stay as long as you’d like in it.”

Eddie enjoyed the way his wife couldn’t stop hugging or touching him. Waylon was very affectionate, which he supposed was also due to his pregnant state. Women got very moody and emotional when carrying children, so he supposed men would too.

The bathwater was suffused with pink by now, but Eddie was beginning to enjoy it. Instead of answering to Waylon’s words, not that he expected to be answered, he began to hum his favourite song. He’d truly found himself a good old-fashioned girl with a pure heart.

Waylon, heavy with fatigue and defeat, slid off his husband. He allowed Eddie to soak as long as he wanted, anything that kept him from the shed. Before he left, he found himself lingering at the doorway, listening to the hum, chills radiating through him.

It surprised him he managed to nap before they got ready to leave.


	10. Disenchanted

It wasn’t easy convincing Eddie to leave, but with a reminder of the eerie quietness and the health of their unborn child, he had the leverage to have them both in the jeep in a few hours. This time, he packed the vehicle with extra clothing, supplies, and money he found hidden well. Not a lot, but enough to get by until…

Waylon shakily exhaled. Taking Eddie home…

Not safe. Not yet.

He stared at the road as they kept rolling on, not entirely sure where he was going, but also knowing he was driving back to Colorado.

“I have to go to the police,” he finally said aloud, not exactly to Eddie.

As long as Waylon insisted on his pregnancy, Eddie seemed fairly compliant of his wishes. He had absolutely refused to wear other clothing than what he’d had in the asylum though, and Waylon only very barely escaped another attempt to strangle him when he suggested the idea of changing. Eddie didn’t like change, even through all the layers of his psychosis.

In the jeep, he was a lamb. He spent the time not talking at all, staring out of the window. It took a long while before they began driving through streets that contained people. And oh, how Eddie had stared at every woman they passed by.

When Waylon spoke of his intention though, Eddie’s head snapped around to him. He still looked somewhat inhuman, the way his eyes were still as red as when they’d met save for the blue irises, and the deep scars and grooves on his face. Normal people would be terrified no doubt.

“Police? Darling, what ever for?”

Waylon kept his eyes on the road, tenser and tenser the more he saw people. He felt like they were all spies for Murkoff, or squealers, ready to raise alarm at the strange man in the passenger seat.

He opted for as less crowded streets as possible.

“I have to show what those fucking bastards did to those patients...to you, Eddie. You don’t remember, but they did. I have video of it. I’m not going to let them get away. Not after...after all this shit I’ve gone through.”

He seethed and smacked the steering wheel.

“Bastards! They’re still out there. They’re going to hurt more people, I can’t...I can’t let…”

His breathing was coming erratically. Shit.

He had the foresight to pull over to a quiet area, park the car, and drop his head on the steering wheel as the tremors took over.

Eddie was about to chide his wife for using such coarse language, but the way Waylon seemed to collapse on himself had him hesitate. He looked over and watched him for a long time before he reached out, tugging Waylon as close as possible. He couldn’t really understand what made his wife so upset, but he’d be a terrible husband if he didn’t comfort his spouse in times of need, right?

“Sh, darling, sh...you’re so empathetic, aren’t you love? Such a good heart, sweet soul.”

It should have been revolting to have Eddie’s affection engulf him whole. Yet Waylon didn’t feel an iota of himself struggle as he deflated against him, ready to be swallowed if that’s what it took to pay for his punishment.

His shoulders quaked, and his fingers clawed onto Eddie’s shirt, the same shirt he refused to take off. Waylon had done his best to wash and dry it, but they couldn’t remove all the stains, not from the shirt nor themselves.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “I helped them. I wouldn’t have if I had known but I did, I fucking let them hurt them...I let them hurt you.”

There was disgust, but for himself. Eddie might have been a psychotic killer, but he was still just as vulnerable in his state, so much so that that had tipped him into the abyss of madness.

He shoved away from Eddie, tried to, and sank against him again.

“...Why am I special to you. I’m...sorry.”

In all honesty, Waylon was reaching a point Eddie couldn’t follow, emotionally or logically. There was more than one wall built up in the destroyed mind of the serial killer that prevented him from returning to reality with any speed. And Waylon’s guilt was nothing Eddie could connect to himself, since he didn’t have a problem with the condition he was in.

“Darling, you’re my wife, how could you ask me such a thing?” Eddie continued holding Waylon, stroking without a sense for appropriate gentleness, “I love you so much, and I always will, forever.”

Waylon sighed, wanting to shake his head at his own stupidity. Of course Eddie wouldn’t understand. And it was more terrifying wondering if he ever could? Was he doing Eddie ill by taking him alone, thinking he had, what? A fucking shot at a shitty life?

A headache began growing.

“I know,” he said, partly believing it. “I know…”

He managed to wiggle free enough so Eddie would let him go. He cracked a smile, gathered his nerve, and kept driving.

It felt like hours before he pulled into a police station, and even when he parked in the far back, his heart was hammering like crazy.

“I’m going inside. I need you to stay here and wait for me, please. Please don’t talk to anyone. I...I don’t trust them, is all. Some might be looking for us, to hurt...the baby, okay? If anything, you can just honk for me.”

The police station triggered an odd reaction in Eddie. He was alert, very much so, but he was also incredibly weary. Something must be leaking through his madness, a memory of getting arrested for what crimes he had committed in the ‘real’ world beyond Mount Massive. 

It was an interesting sight to see a man as big as Eddie kind of cower to hide himself from the cars with sirens, and the uniformed people entering and exiting the station.

“Darling, don’t...don’t go in there. It’s not safe for you. I should come with you. But even better if we just leave.”

Waylon sensed the disturbance and could only assume rather than know for sure what had Eddie cowering unlike a serial killer. To ask him a question though meant a loop of headaches and frustration.

He reached over and stroked Eddie’s face, yet another surprise at how tender the touch was, so unlike the forced gestures.

“Eddie, look at me. These people won’t hurt me. They’re going to help, but they won’t understand...what we have. It’s risky. I need to go in first, and I’ll come back for you.”

He hesitated, but was desperate to get into the station. So he leaned over and drew Eddie in for a brief kiss, their foreheads bumping.

“I’ll come back for you. That’s a promise.”

Eddie almost had him stay entirely, but just before he could grab Waylon and keep him there, the former software engineer had slipped out and closed the jeep doors. Perhaps locking them would be an even better idea, because Eddie did not look happy, squashed in the jeep as he was. His face pressed to the window, just to watch over Waylon’s short walk into the station.

“Darling!” he called, planting the hand that so easily wielded a knife (even now) there as if to touch his wife.

Waylon never power walked so fast. He would have ran, though it seemed less than prudent to rush into a police unit looking as frazzled as he did. Plus, the broken leg and wounded side kept him at a moderate pace.

Clutching the camcorder to his chest, he went in, forgetting that, for once, he was momentarily free of Eddie Gluskin.

Of course, he expected the commotion that followed his claims, along with the heavy silence preceding that. Then, it was him in a room, his camcorder, the ordeal spilling like pus from a festering wound. He said nothing of his personal trauma, and when he saw the officers watching the video, he knew they didn’t have to ask.

He kept flicking his eyes to the clock, a nag about Eddie making him do so.

It was half an hour before he knew he needed to check on the killer.

“No, no, I don’t need to go to the hospital,” he insisted again, voice curt. “Look, I need to...I…”

He tugged on his hair. 

“Fuck, listen. I...one of those...I mean, the patients…”

Needless to say, an argument that Waylon won on ferocity and victimization alone. They gave him the benefit of the doubt, if only because, true, a killer in their midst, unstable at that, could mean more harm than good if approached badly.

So that’s how Waylon found himself rushing outside, followed by a hoard of officers who he barked to keep their distance. They did, and he was hobbling as fast as he could, waving at the jeep and calling Eddie to ensure him he was back. 

Eddie was still in the jeep, which was a credit to his delusional dedication to Waylon, but there was no way he kept calm at the sight of the officers following Waylon. He scrambled against the door until it gave way and let him outside, where the large man picked himself up, his knife at the ready as he looked around for a way to flee. 

“Darling! What have you done?!”

Waylon cursed when Eddie braced for impact. A chorus of drawn weapons had him turning his head as he kept rushing after Eddie.

“Stop! You’re freaking him out!”

He flailed at them with one arm, then stumbled and landed partly on Eddie.

“Eddie, Eddie, relax, I won’t let them hurt you,” he said, cupping the killer’s face with both hands. He glanced back. “You’re scaring him! Get the fuck back!”

Protocol dictated the officers take aim, but most shared looks of reluctance. They’d never had protocol with a psychotic killer from an asylum that supposedly experimented on its patients.

“Now!” Waylon bellowed, dragging Eddie’s head lower, as if that would shield him.

His neck ached from spinning between the two, but Eddie earned the majority of his attention.

“Please, Eddie. Focus on me...I got you, okay? Just me. See? They won’t come closer. I warned them. Trust me...please, if everyone’s betrayed you before, just trust me. I’ll make things right.”

“You just want to see me locked up again, is that what it is, you ungrateful whore?!” Waylon’s best efforts were thwarted, and he should have known the second Eddie began talking like that again, snarling with anger, dangerous as he was in Mount Massive. It would have been sane to allow the cops to open fire on what was still a proven serial killer, but Waylon’s body blocked clear aim.

Especially once Eddie grabbed ahold of him, knife at his wife’s throat with no regard to the officers.

“You want to make me go away so you can fuck other men, slut! After all I’ve done for you?!”

Waylon could never prepare for the violence that exploded off the Groom. Even now, after having received it multiple times, he felt the instinct to beg and scream for help or mercy (or both) rush through him like spikes.

Yet he bypassed that all with extreme effort, clawing at one of Eddie’s arms and managing to shout at the officers not to shoot.

“Wait, please…”

He panted, picking up on a detail that might have been nothing in particular.

“Eddie, listen...you’re scared. I know you’re scared. I am too. But listen, they scare you...you remember something, don’t you? It’s not me you’re mad at...something in your life before you woke up. You were in prison before the asylum. You killed women...a lot of women, didn’t you? And you’re scared to go back…”

Eddie only gave a grunt, not acknowledging or denying Waylon’s theory. It was probably correct, a keen insight into the psyche of a man whose sanity was in all likelihood beyond being restored.   
But Eddie at least didn’t slice Waylon’s throat. The officers were closer now and although they hadn’t shot anyone yet, the guns were still drawn and ready, ready for Eddie.

“How could you do this to me?” Eddie almost whimpered as he let the knife sink back to his side, “We were so happy, together, just you and me darling...”

Officers were making demands now. Get on the floor, step away, drop the weapon. It was all cacophony. Waylon only heard the hurt in Eddie’s voice, the pitifulness no other inmate in the asylum had ever heard.

Waylon didn’t run away. He turned despite the shouts and grabbed Eddie’s face, hard.

“Eddie…”

He gripped harder. “I can’t...they’re going to arrest you now,” he said in a tone only Eddie could hear. He swallowed, realizing what he was about to, what hell he might be unleashing onto the world.

He really had been stripped of his sanity.

“Run,” he whispered. “Hide. Run. Run, damn it, or they’ll take you away from me and I won’t be able to help anymore. Run.”

There was much question in Eddie’s face, but he understood enough of Waylon’s desperation to know it was true. Though it pained him beyond anything to leave his wife and future child behind, he knew, instinctively, that no one would convict Waylon of anything. He was too pure, too good. His pearl. Eddie would have liked to kiss him once more at least, but the people in uniform were already far too close.

It was a sight to behold, the way Eddie turned and fled, hastened across the street and ducking behind a corner just as bullets began to fill the air where he’d just been.

“Shit! Do you know who that was?!” One of the officers grabbed Waylon, not too hard since they’d all witnessed what kind of trauma the man had endured, but firm enough to prevent him from escaping too.

“That was Eddie Gluskin. Big case a while back. Killed fifteen women! Shit. Well. Come on Mr. Park. Let’s get you back inside. And then home.”


	11. The unnamed Feeling

Let them call him names, crude or not. In the end, what could you really call a man who had endured what Waylon had, who had fallen into darkness and came back permanently stained?

It didn’t really matter. He had the evidence.

He had the chance to decide if Murkoff’s demise was worth fucking his family over.

He hadn’t hesitated to upload it all.

The highest of authorities rolled out the stops for him, covering his tracks, weeding out Murkoff shareholders and the like, anyone who might be related to the corporation and its sinister ideals. No one quite knew what had happened in the asylum. That is, Waylon never mentioned the...thing of smoke, nor had he allowed that last part of the tape to be seen. He’d cut it out. Tricky work. But hey, it’s what he did.

Miles Upshur.

That had been the name of the journalist that went missing.

Waylon didn’t have to think much on it to believe that thing had been Miles. Or...Miles had been it?

He long since tried thinking hard on anything that regarded the asylum.

Eddie was the exception.

It mattered little that he was treated at the hospital, that they worried about the ligatures inside him as much as those visibly seen. He never explained Eddie’s official role with him, but none of them seemed to care he was a victim. He was still a killer and had a sentence to complete.

And then, home.

Waylon had stood still as Lisa clung to him and cried into his neck. She’d been gently informed of the (vague) happenings at the asylum. He’d held her tightly in return, and held his sons tighter even more.

It wasn’t the same though.

He wasn’t the same man, which, ironically, he believed Lisa had always wanted. 

Not this though. She didn’t want a husband who stared too long in the mirror, who woke up screaming and writhing in bed, who had not once cried since his ordeal, who wouldn’t so much as speak of it to her.

All he wanted to do was stay inside, hold his children, and pretend the comedy movies they watched were funny.

He guessed people’s sympathy only went so far. She’d been understanding when he refused therapy and why he wouldn’t take on a new job. He hardly went outside. He hardly did, well, anything.

When he did something, it was to an extreme.

He broke his own finger fixing up the garbage disposal, which then lead to plaster being needed because that one tile on the counter looked cracked, and that would haunt him all day.

So, yeah, maybe it was for the better she took the kids and left him.

“You need to figure things out,” she had told him while he studied his bandaged hand. 

Figure what out?

She promised she’d still be there for him, but by now Waylon knew they weren’t husband and wife. Not lovers, hardly friends. Former wife and husband sounded better. At least he felt a pang at his children being taken, but, that too, seemed right. He didn’t want them growing up with him this way, not while he was ‘figuring’ things out.

They had relocated under a protection program, and the higher ups had agreed to relocate his wife and children and put personnel on them for a while.

With the home empty, Waylon filled the space obsessively with newspapers. No unusual deaths of women...no male body turned up or arrested.

He exhaled, rubbed his face, and tried to pay attention to the news.

Maybe he should try therapy. Maybe they’d do electroshock therapy and shut his mind up, stop him from dreaming of...him.

-x-

It wasn’t halfway around the world, or even the country, but Eddie was still too far from his wife. He felt Waylon’s absence keenly, even as he situated himself to deal with this new life he’d been given. At first, he had to hide, had to avoid even the slightest contact with people. When he did bump into some, they always screamed, and they always ran. It had his blood boil. These ignorant whores, whores everywhere!

Eventually, he found himself a new home. An old house, boarded up, abandoned and broken. Eddie felt much kinship with the building, and made it his nest. His workshop. Whores and sluts still had to be punished, to make the world a purer place. One fit for his child to grow up in.

Eddie prowled streets at night, and his victims were people that no one would miss. The old house’s basement stank of blood, the attic a silent house of horrors with its strung up bodies.

But Eddie was still lonely, and so his search widened, until he found what his heart so craved.

Waylon looked at home with children, and it wasn’t until Eddie saw the woman that he made the connection. Waylon already had children with someone. The rage that Eddie felt at that was indescribable, yet he controlled it long enough to follow Lisa to her new home. And there, Eddie waited. And waited. Just for the right moment.

-x-

The phone rang at a quarter to midnight, the sound of it echoing through the Parks’ house.

Waylon started, flailing his arms as if that’d do anything to a monster or intruder. The wail of the phone didn’t physically harm him though, and he cursed, scolding himself again for not having the nerve to register for a fucking gun.

He scrambled over items that were just blocks of color for all he cared, and looked at the I.D.

Unknown.

He tensed.

Slowly, he grabbed the phone, then shoved it to his ear.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Darling,” Eddie cooed over the line, gently as if he was holding Waylon close and breathing into his ear, “It’s alright now darling. I forgive you.”

Waylon lost his breath.

Time grinded to a halt, suspended, like in the asylum. That damn building burnt to the ground, hardly a skeleton now.

When he spoke, it was as if he’d borrowed someone else’s meek, overwhelmed voice.

“Eddie...you’re...alive. How…? Where...Eddie. Jesus, Eddie, it’s you…”

“Darling, you sound surprised,” Eddie seemed to be walking around somewhere, the echo of his steps audible on the line, “did you not have faith in your husband? Why, Mrs. Gluskin, that hurts me so.”

There was a sound in the background, muffled screams of a feminine sort.

Waylon shot up to stand up. He’d recognize a scream anywhere, and knew each type. The asylum had cursed him with an ear so precise he’d considered blowing out his own eardrums if it meant peace.

“Eddie? What’s going on? Where are you? How did...are...are you okay? Are you hurt?”

If anything, it sounded quite the opposite, but if Eddie was unleashing pain on someone, it meant he, too was in pain.

“I just miss you so much, darling,” Eddie continued to sound sweet as sugar on the phone, oblivious to the noise polluting the atmosphere his words were aiming for. He gave a grunt, walking once more, the muffled sounds now closer.

“You’re being terribly rude, Lisa. I’m speaking with my wife you know.”

Waylon’s blood went cold. In that moment, his heart overpowered any other sound, and panic reclaimed him easily and quickly. He was back in the asylum, dread and terror devouring him from the feet up, convincing him he was doomed.

“Lisa,” he said without realizing it.

Then, rage, and something else he couldn’t place, something too soft to warrant dissection right then and there.

“Don’t fucking hurt her,” he said. “Eddie, you don’t understand. Don’t hurt her. She’s done nothing wrong!”

Reasoning with a madman was something Waylon should have abandoned a long time ago, and yet he tried again. Eddie seemed busy for a moment and the muffled sounds were now whimpers, before Lisa’s voice was clearer.

“Waylon?! Waylon oh god! Oh god help me! Help me!”

“She’s a very chatty slut. So loud. So rude. Not good at all.” Eddie replied in a sing-song voice, “Darling, I know what you’ve done with her. And I want you to know,” another pained moan of Lisa’s punctured the air, “I forgive you for it. A woman has her urges, even if they are grotesque at times.”

Waylon cursed to himself, paced, nearly put a hole in the wall with his fist. He couldn’t tap into fear, couldn’t allow panic to win, to think the way most people did. Eddie Gluskin was alive. Hadn’t he wanted that deep down, instead of pretending it’d be better to hear about his death on the news?

Hadn’t he wanted Eddie to perhaps find him? A sick fantasy so twisted he stopped pretending it wasn’t.

He had to reorganize his mind into Eddie’s state.

Shit. His children.

“Eddie,” he breathed, “that’s...not fair. I told you...I had a life before...before we met. Before the asylum. You ran...I thought you dead. I...had to go back to my family, make sure my family was safe. Lisa...she...couldn’t understand how much you fill my dreams, every night, even when I’m awake…”

“Oh, hush darling, I understand,” Eddie had the phone between shoulder and ear, tightening a rope around Lisa’s neck. The poor woman was terrified, and sobbing for all she had left. At least her children weren’t here, and the monster would only take her life.

“I’m just making sure nothing stands between us, is all. Your other children are asleep, so Lisa, you should really be a good girl and keep quiet. You don’t want them to wake up and see you like this, strung up like the filthy whore you are.”

Waylon lowered the phone and curled into himself, his skin prickling with every awful emotion his body was struggling to handle at once. He made a pathetic sound against his knee, gripped the phone like it’d break.

He’d asked for this all along. He’d let Eddie survive and now Lisa would die for it.

“Eddie,” he said, not caring that his voice broke, “my kids...Eddie, let...don’t kill her. Let me...come to you, okay? It isn’t fair you do this over the phone. Where are you?”

He was already dragging clothes on, snatching keys, and, as an afterthought, his camcorder.

Eddie huffed as if Waylon had just booped his nose or something equally silly, but he did like the thought of Waylon coming to him. It had been too long since he’d seen his beloved wife.

“Oh darling, I know you’re so eager to be with me...” he described the surroundings, unaware that Waylon might have others listening in, or bring them with him.

“But darling, no tricks, no sirens, and no one else. We wouldn’t want anything unfortunate to happen, right?”

Waylon snapped the phone shut, shoved it into his pocket, and flew down the streets like hell chased his heels. There was no one to call. That’d just piss off Eddie. There was nothing to bring the killer to his knees, to-

Waylon steered the car hard around a corner, shaking away the memory of that figure that had saved him (he believed that now), the same one that had Eddie cowering in the pool of blood.

He didn’t remember parking or running to the shabby place. A perfect nest for Eddie.

He barged through the first crack he could thrust himself through, and stumbled to a stop.

So dark. Way too dark.

“Eddie,” he called.

“Waylon!” It wasn’t Eddie that greeted him, but Lisa. But Lisa as Waylon had never seen her before. Her beautiful hair was ripped and cut in places, bruises littered her face, her neck, and blood stained her clothes. Of course she’d fought as much as she could, but Eddie Gluskin was a mountain compared to the petite Mrs. Park.

“Oh god Waylon!” 

Before she could approach her husband though, Lisa was lifted from the ground, her hands going to her neck to claw at the rope that hauled her off of her feet. 

“Darling!” 

Eddie looked as terrifying as ever as he emerged from the shadows, one hand on the rope, and the other...Lisa let out a shriek as she spotted her sons behind the killer’s knee.

Waylon had been so wrong, so stupidly, boldly wrong.

There was a fate worse than that asylum and he felt it scar deep into him. His children’s face, so young, too young to even properly understand what the fuck was unraveling before them. But the death of their mom, they’d feel that.

Waylon couldn’t afford screaming and cursing. It would end his own life and leave his children--God, he couldn’t even think on it.

“Let her down,” he told Eddie. His voice was distorted, and he recognized it too late as the one he’d equipped as the Bride. The role had never left him, hard as he tried. “You want...to be a good father, so you s-say. But right now, you’re terrifying the children, Eddie. If you forgive me, you let her down. She...I have nothing to do with her anymore, but if you kill her, I...no father would let their children see that.”

The children were at least something Eddie could be predicted in, because even through his madness, he would not bring harm to them. Eddie let go of the rope and Lisa crashed to the ground and stilled, her sons whimpering for their parents but kept at bay by Eddie.

“Now, children,” it was easy for him to lift up both boys into one arm. He pointed to Waylon, “that is your mother. I will be your father. We’ll be so happy together, my little darlings! So happy. I’ll never let anyone hurt you. Never!”

Eddie carried the children away from Lisa, who still struggled for breath on the floor.

“Darling, I expect you to take of this. This whore cannot live with us, so she should die and hang, like the rest of them. I’ll bring the children to bed.”

Waylon obeyed instinct and crouched by Lisa, not liking the sound of her landing. She had a few broken bones at the least. When he tried to touch her, however, she smacked him away and gave him a look so fierce it hurt him everywhere.

He earned it though.

He never felt so helpless seeing Eddie usher his newfound children away.

He wasn’t going to kill Lisa, but surely she understood interfering meant death, that responding to Eddie with typical logic and force meant a slower death?

“I’m...so sorry,” was all he could say, seemed all he could say.

She would call the police, however.

Eddie would kill more because of it, even her.

So, perhaps too easily, Waylon got up, stepped back, then turned his back on her, leaving her to do just that once she gathered her strength.

They wouldn’t be at the old home for long anyway.

As he listened to his shoes crunch over gravel, he convinced himself he was taking the right path. No, that wasn’t right. The right path meant ending Eddie’s life.

Waylon shut his eyes, took in a deep breath, and pressed on. Eddie was already by the jeep, preparing to leave. Waylon rushed over and embraced his sons, who eagerly returned the gesture.

“Hey, hey...been a while,” he joked, kissing their heads. “It’s okay. We’re going to stop at home. Get some things, then go on a trip, okay? Mommy’s fine.”

His youngest, Jacob, sniffed and rubbed his nose. “But he said you’re Mommy now.”

Waylon opened his mouth, shut it.

“He won’t hurt you. Now, be good and settle in. It’s late,” he said. He wasn’t surprised Eddie had strapped them in properly.

Still, he couldn’t help give Eddie a hairy eyeball as he slammed the door shut to the driver’s seat once he got in.

Eddie had taken every precaution with the children, keeping them almost perfectly content except for the fact they were terrified of him and just nearly witnessed the death of their mother. But a man wasn’t perfect, right?

When the jeep rolled down the street, there was still no sign of Lisa. The woman wasn’t stupid. She would call the police and hide in the house until someone with authority and a gun came to collect her. 

Eddie hummed as the drive continued. Only after a while it became clear it was a lullaby, and it was working, because both of Waylon’s sons nodded off to sleep.

“Ah, the little darlings are sleeping. Such precious children.”

Waylon almost punched him, but one, he preferred to not die when his children depended on him, and two, he still had that fucking nuisance of a quality that made it hard to throw violence at someone, even in defense.

God, he was fucked up.

He merely grunted at Eddie’s words, saying nothing as he made it back home. He told Eddie to stay in the car, expecting him to watch over his kids no less, as he, once again, packed as much shit as he could into the car.

He’d made sure to collect all his data on the asylum, laptop and camcorder included.

Then, more silence as he drove, taking them far off into the night, and finally stopping at a hotel. It’d have to do. He had Eddie go around back while he checked in. Then, he unloaded the car, irritated and yet not surprised Eddie volunteered to take the children up himself.

It was a beautiful room, and Waylon didn’t give a fuck.

If nothing else, he appreciated its luxury in that it connected two suites. He had Eddie place the kids in one, wrote the children a note so they would understand the door to their part of the suite wasn’t locked. Then, it was just him and his fucking husband with a king bed.

Fucking nuisance again; he’d asked for a double.

Or shit. Didn’t double mean one bed?

He really shouldn’t have been thinking about it, so he yanked out some clothes, set up his laptop on the table, and decided now he could talk.

“How’d you find me?”

Eddie was distinctly more interested in something other than talking though. He’d eyed the bed for a long moment, allowing Waylon to be as sullen and stubborn as he wanted to be for now. 

“Oh darling, I never lost you. The arbor of my sweet love...I will never forget it. I’ve been watching you since the day we parted.”

That wasn’t true, but it sounded a lot more dedicated and husband-ly. 

“But darling, this is no time for talking. I have missed you so much. Come here.”

Waylon didn’t believe it either, instead rubbing his temples and saying all sorts of nasty things about himself and Eddie and Murkoff in his own head. He had sanctity in that at least. Or at least, he liked to think so sometimes.

He tapped away at his laptop while Eddie spoke, hacking into the hotel’s system undetected and wiping out the footage of his arrival. Buying time. He couldn’t risk police intervention. It was a trigger he had to decode before it became a reality.

He glanced up at Eddie.

Careful. He couldn’t run his mouth or ignore him.

With a sigh, he shoved away from the table and came over, arms crossed, more irritated that Eddie seemed to forgive his petulance. Absence made the heart grow more twisted, maybe?

“I’m here,” he announced.

And he didn’t say it, and wouldn’t say it, and wished to all good fortune it was a side effect of Stockholm Syndrome, but some part of him had missed Eddie too.


	12. Somewhere only we Know

Eddie didn’t punish him for petulance either, drawing Waylon in for a kiss he didn’t deserve. But he couldn’t help it, he just missed his dear wife so much, how could he not?

“Darling, how’s the baby?” he whispered against Waylon’s lips, his hand on Waylon’s stomach and circling. As well as pushing the fabric away to press them closer together. Eddie’s other hand came around his wife’s waist, pressing them together enough to grind their ‘vulgar’ bits together.

Waylon flinched at the first touch. Then, it was as if he hadn’t reacted that way at all, his body long detached from his mind and molding to the touch. He’d never forgotten that one night he’d spent with Eddie. Unwillingly or not, he couldn’t shake off how it’d left him quivering.

God, he should have been checked into a mental hospital months ago.

Waylon resisted more openly at first, but that too waned quickly.

The baby?

Oh.

“Fine,” he said, shivers crawling through him at the way Eddie shamelessly rubbed up against him. That explained the way he eyed the bed.

Waylon’s heart sped up again. He glanced at the door connecting the rooms.

“The kids are in the other room,” he tried.

“Then you’ll have to be quiet, darling,” Eddie chuckled, showering Waylon’s neck with kisses and bites, pain and pleasure to mark what he considered his all along. All thoughts of Lisa, of the separation, everything was gone. Because Eddie had exactly what he wanted. A family. One he would love and protect to his very last breath.

That was probably why he was so mellow with Waylon. There was nothing but love blooming in him for their little quartet. All they needed now was a home, and Eddie already had a place in mind.

“You’re excited. I can hear your heart racing, darling. And this,” Eddie squeezed shamelessly at Waylon’s growing bulge, “you can’t deny you’ve missed me.”

Excitement and fear intertwined often, and were equally mistaken for one instead of the other. That made it easier for Waylon to nod and play along, gasping and grunting, both from the sensations and the abhorrence at himself.

Deep down, he’d fantasized of another night like this. He knew it. Disgusting, wrong, but true. He accepted that now even if it meant leaving him reeling. He was part monster in his own right.

So it made it too easy to cup Eddie’s neck, open his mouth to him, draw his naked body into bed and have it settle between his naked thighs.

Sick, right, selfish, dangerous. No labels mattered when he was tracing Eddie’s shoulders, tentatively but certainly not reluctantly.

This time though, he had more control, and that might have made it more wrong, when he guided Eddie inside, centimeter by centimeter, panting the other’s name like a prayer, watching his face.

Waylon’s eagerness came as no surprise, but all pleasure for Eddie. Without resistance, it felt even more meant to be. Their union came so easy, he barely recalled how they had gotten undressed so quickly.

It didn’t matter. They were uniting again and Eddie would never surrender the bliss he felt at that. Waylon’s hand was on his neck, his shoulder, grabbing desperately at him, unable to deal with the sensations all too silently.

“Darling,” Eddie exclaimed as he began thrusting into his wife, “oh, darling~”

Waylon consented to each proclamation of his title by gasping back Eddie’s name, spreading his legs wider or clamping them down hard along Eddie’s hips. Within that moment of primeval state of shamelessness and ecstasy, he would let Eddie have him, have his children, carve them a sick home for their sick love.

There was no one needing saving, no defenses needed to stay alive. Just the smacks of their coupling, their voices, their heartbeats and breath.

Waylon eventually drew Eddie down for a long kiss, breaking it only to say, “Harder…”

He wanted it to all burn into his already damaged soul.

-x-

The night was long, and well spent. Who knew that sex with a madman could be addictive enough to repeat the experience, again and again until Waylon simply fell asleep, leaving himself vulnerable and exposed to Eddie?

It didn’t matter how early Waylon woke up, Eddie was always ahead of him. This time, there was a cart in the room, a cart bearing a lot of breakfast foods. And his sons were on the foot of the bed, eating as they watched and listened to Eddie, who was standing before them, gesturing with a knife.

“And then, your mother hid in a locker! Silly little thing, isn’t she, darlings?” 

The two boys looked confused, to Waylon then to Eddie before nodding behind their PBJ sandwiches. With crusts cut off, even.

Awakening to the sound of his children had been a ritual before the asylum. Waylon shifted, pleased at the sounds of their little voices and chewing. Stretching, he groaned and internally cursed. Fuck, he was so sore. He didn’t think he could walk.

Oh.

His eyes snapped open.

He sat up on his elbows, ignoring the ache from his burning backside.

His children looked at him and greeted him, coming over with half-eaten sandwiches in palms, cuddling into him.

“H-Hey,” he said, kissing each of their heads, chuckling for their benefit.

Eddie was awake. He always was.

Waylon double checked his children, found not a trace of harm, not even a bruise.

“You guys okay?” he asked in a croak.

His older son, Michael, nodded. “We’re okay. Um...daddy,” he pointed to Eddie, “made us food.”

Waylon rubbed his face and sat up more, being sure his lower half was covered. Not that it mattered much, with his neck no doubt mottled with Eddie’s love.

“How come we have another daddy and you’re mommy?” Jacob asked, munching his food again.

“It’s...a long story. But don’t worry, everything’s gonna be fine. Eddie won’t hurt you. He sees you as his children, so don’t be afraid.”

Jacob grumbled and looked at his sandwich. “I’m not scared.”

Thank goodness. It looked like neither of his children were afraid. Perplexed, sure. Curious, probably. Scared? Being so young must have spared them the fear that otherwise would follow being pampered by Eddie.

“Good morning...Eddie,” he said.

“Good morning darling, I see you slept well,” Eddie seemed absolutely delighted to have his family all together like this. He held out a plate to Waylon, this one actually containing scrambled eggs and toast and two strips of bacon. Were he not a psychotic killer, Eddie would make for a loving husband.

“Eat fast. The children and I are eager to go home.”

Waylon took the plate, rubbed his eyes, and picked up on Eddie’s meaning even in his half-asleep stupor. A home? 

“Home? I don’t know, Eddie. The...people might be looking for us. We can’t just get a home out in public.”

“I want a big house!” Jacob said, extending his arms high up, sandwich done, for emphasis. “And I want a dog. And a cat, and a parrot…”

“Yes darling, but home is where we belong. Where the heart is.” Eddie put a large hand on Jacob’s head, ruffling the young boy’s hair. He had killed people with the same hands that caressed the child so carefully. Not all of Eddie Gluskin was lost to insanity.

“They won’t bother us at home. And the children can have everything they need.”

Waylon watched the way Jacob giggled at the affection, unaware of what those hands had done, how many men and women it had mutilated before stringing them up or thrusting their heads into a buzzsaw. Eddie had wanted children more than anything.

He knew it was wrong on so many levels to consider a ‘life’ with Eddie, but it didn’t stop his ever becoming deranged mind from doing it. He almost believed it, that Eddie would be a great father, that they could live in their own world.

After all, he’d wanted a new place, a fresh start, hadn’t he?

Waylon sighed and kissed Jacob’s head.

“We can’t have all those pets. They’d attack each other.”

Jacob pouted. “Not my pets…”

Waylon knew where ‘home’ meant. He cracked a smile at Eddie, set his food down, and got out of bed, sheets wrapped around his waist.

“Boys, go wash up after breakfast. Brush your teeth and get dressed.”

He heard a chorus of familiar whining, and saw them roll on the bed in protest. They had no clue what debauchery had been going on last night on that bed.

Waylon muttered something to himself and opened his laptop. He checked the news, hacked into what he could without detection, finding traces of Lisa’s progress. His phone had a lot of missed calls.

“Eddie,” he said, “are you talking...about the asylum?”

Eddie had watched the children leave with the watchful eye of some kind of predator, not to prey on them, but to rip to pieces anything that could think about harming them. 

Waylon was important too, but Eddie had always, always wished for a legacy. Here were two perfect boys to carry on the Gluskin name, and to give it a better reputation than Eddie’s father ever had.

“Yes darling. No one will bother us there. They’ll be afraid, they’ll go away. We can be a family there!”

A family together. Forever, in Eddie’s mind. Nevermind that his children couldn’t function in school, couldn’t learn that the world was tough sometimes. Eddie would probably strangle the mothers of any children that even looked at his sons ugly, blaming her for their poor manners.

Waylon’s eyes widened on the screen. They were closing in on them.

The police and the whole goddamn SWAT would be on them soon. He had no time to talk to Eddie, to--

The documents.

He didn’t reply to Eddie, instead scrambling with his stuff, pulling up video feed from the asylum, old files saved that no one but the government had access to now. There. That document. The one he’d forgotten about, that had been nagging him.

He compared it quickly with the files the police had archived on the serial killer. Before the asylum, violent abuse from a young age. 

Waylon looked away as realization crested in him, puzzle pieces clicking into place.

But it didn’t matter, did it? That Eddie had been damaged before he came to the asylum. Maybe, if he had acted sooner, Eddie could have been helped. But now? From the files he had looked at again, and again, and again on that damn engine, it had done a damage too deep for anyone to reach.

Waylon was no better than those doctors, wasn’t he? He’d believed he could be a hero, save himself, save Eddie.

Waylon swallowed, put his face in his hands.

They were going to take Eddie away. There was nothing to stop that, and it meant more cages, more agony that would strip what was left of Eddie. And if he broke loose?

He looked up, observed the way Eddie watched over the children, the smile on his face, despite the menace in his eyes--not directed at the children. He loved those children. He would do anything for them. It was the life Eddie never had, he was being the father he never had.

Waylon fell into his sympathy, his sorrow.

Slowly, he smiled at Eddie.

“Yeah,” he said, getting up and going to Eddie.

It wasn’t going to be the way Eddie wanted. He touched his face, stroking the skin gently.

“It’s gonna be great. You’re a father now, a great father, and you’ll always be a wonderful father to our kids. I think it’s only right...that we name the baby after you.”

“Darling, that’s a great idea,” Eddie seemed utterly content. How long would it last though, before he felt the urge to kill another human? How long before family wasn’t a buffer for Eddie anymore?

It was a ticking human bomb in Waylon’s grasp right now.

“I’m glad you approve. I would hate for us to fight. It’s not good for the boys.”

“I know,” Waylon said, his smile for Eddie, and genuine. After all, Eddie was too damaged, so deranged from being fucked over against his will that he was lost in darkness and no one had the light to get him out.

Waylon paused, then rested his head against Eddie’s chest, seeking his heartbeat.

“I know,” he repeated. “...Come on. Let’s go home.”

-x-

Home, as Waylon correctly predicted, was Mount Massive. The road was deserted, no sounds, no birds, not even the wind. When the jeep pulled up to the building, Eddie sighed with relief. It looked a little more dilapidated now, the chapel completely burned down, but the female ward and main house still stood. Welcoming. Rotting.

At least someone had been to the house of horrors and removed the sheer endless amount of corpses from the premises.

“Now, boys, you can have any room you like. This is your new home.”

All along the ride, Waylon played the part. He smiled at Eddie’s enthusiasm, engaged them all in family play time by playing typical road games.

One would have believed they were a real family on their way home.

In a sense, they were. Eddie believed it with all his damaged, twisted heart. Waylon let him. It was all he could give Eddie, the last gift for retribution on his actions. He’d helped Eddie become like this, after all.

The kids looked skeptical. Michael seemed entranced, ever the child curious about horror movies and the like. Jacob wrinkled his nose, hesitated, but looking at his ‘parents’ faces seemed to assuage any fears.

“This whole place...is ours?” he asked.

Waylon looked at Eddie, then nodded. “It’ll be fun. It’ll be okay.”

He knew it wouldn’t be.

And it wasn’t.

The authorities after them weren’t bumbling idiots. They knew of Waylon’s hacking abilities and expected it. That, and he still had his phone, which allowed them easy access to trace. He let them. 

As they left the jeep, Waylon videotaped the scene, knowing it was for a private collection he would bury deep for himself. Eddie was smiling, proud, eager, fatherly.

Then, the sirens.

Jacob and Michael were by Eddie’s legs, barely inside when they heard the noise.

It was too soon, but they were coming.

“Get inside,” he told his kids, looking at the distance, seeing the flash of lights. 

For once, his kids listened, hurrying on inside.

Waylon rushed over to Eddie, grabbing his arm, tugging him inside as well, just through the gaping hole. He glanced over and made sure his kids were sufficiently out of view.

“Eddie,” he said, searching the killer’s eyes, looking every bit like a frightened wife who didn’t know what to do.

He held Eddie’s hand tightly.

“It’s alright, darling. Take the boys somewhere safe. You know your way around,” He gently detached Waylon from him, gave him a gentle shove towards the staircase. He would protect his family against whatever monsters were coming after them. He was their father, it was his duty.

“I will take care of everything. No one will hurt my family.”

Eddie had brought weapons along, something that came naturally to an insane killer such as he was. Little did he know that the long blade in his hand and his massive size would do little to what he faced.

Waylon had almost lunged after Eddie, terrified. Just terrified. For what, he really didn’t know. Terrified they’d take the killer to another asylum? Of what would happen to his children when it was all over? Would Lisa take them from him permanently?

Questions fermented in his mind, but he didn’t let it show as he shushed and held his children. Somehow he was surprised when they asked if Eddie would be okay. That didn’t mean they adored the killer. Maybe it meant they knew what Waylon knew all along and no one believed.

Eddie was still human.

Hurt, mad, psychotic, violent. But still human.

He whispered to his children’s head, kissed them each, braced himself.

When it came, it tore him apart.

It was like a physical manifestation of pain that wasn’t physical. He heard a barrage of gunfire, felt his children tense and cry out at the scary sounds. 

No.

No…

Waylon snapped his head up. He couldn’t see much, but he heard it.

He thrust his children under a desk for safety, assured them all was well, and ran just as he had run for his life in the asylum.

The light stung his eyes. He heard a voice over a megaphone. Ignored it. He hurried forward.

Eddie.

He didn’t see himself collapse beside the body. So much blood. You’d think he adjusted to the sight of it, the odor, the feel as he lifted Eddie’s upper body into his lap.

“Eddie,” he said, and this time he heard his voice crack.

Trembling fingers touched a bloodied face.

This wasn’t what he had wanted. 

He didn’t have to look more to know Eddie had met his match, that his strength and insanity couldn’t overcome this.

“Oh, God...Eddie…”

It had been obvious, for Waylon anyway, what would happen. That the police wouldn’t take any chances with this madman, who had left a string of bodies, literally, in the attic of the house Lisa had called them to.

There was no redemption, and no help for this man and putting him down was doing the world a favour.

At least it had been quick, though plenty of the officers, upon viewing the corpses and what had happened to Mrs Park, didn’t feel the need for mercy for Eddie Gluskin.

And Eddie, somewhere inside of his messed up mind, knew he had this coming too. He was never going to have the happy ending he wanted so badly he killed and bent the world around his twisted dreams.

At least, as he lay in his blood, he knew his family was safe. And there was the voice, the touch, his darling come to bid him farewell.

“Darling,” he wheezed, opening his bloodshot eyes one more time to look at Waylon, unhurt, precious, perfect. 

“We were...so beautiful...”

Waylon didn’t know the world beyond Eddie Gluskin in his arms. He knew the truth of this man, of what had shoved him into insanity. No one cared though. He was too damaged for their sake, but Waylon saw the man he could be.

It was better to not let Eddie remember that part of him.

So Waylon smile, laughing gently and stroking Eddie’s face.

“Yeah...thanks to you,” he said, then found Eddie’s hand. “We’ll be okay. You did...great. You have your legacy, okay? We’ll be safe now. You p-protected us, and, and the baby,” he was speaking with fierce enthusiasm, and it wasn’t sure if it was for Eddie’s sake, or his own.

“He’ll...we’ll all see you soon. On that other side, yeah? You’ve done a lot so...sleep now, darling. I’ll be there when you wake up again…”

“I was a good father...a good husband?” Eddie whispered, no strength left in his voice but his eyes held the plea, just one last confirmation that he had not stained the world as his father had. Of course, it didn’t occur to Eddie that his father hadn’t been a serial killer, but that hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things. 

“I love you so much, my darling...my perfect...bride...”

The final breath of life left Eddie Gluskin, and his massive body stilled where it lay in Waylon’s lap. It was over, the last piece of Mount Massive and its horrible secrets, gone from the world.

“Waylon! Waylon where are the boys?!” Lisa came barrelling past the officers, a mother desperate and terrified for her children.

Waylon had nodded to Eddie, allowing him that final confirmation. Then, the weight of death collapsed into his arms, and still Waylon held him, pressing his head to Eddie’s, mouthing something no one had privy to hear.

I love you too.

And he didn’t know what kind of love. Love for the idea of saving Eddie, love for the parts of Eddie that needed it and never received it. Love of a twisted sort that was not meant for this world? Maybe all of it and more.

He’d never felt as sick as he did then. But Lisa’s voice lifted his head.

“Inside,” he whispered. “Don’t...let them see.”

It was yet another gift, as well as a benefit of his children, who wouldn’t know of such horrors.

Eddie Gluskin was dead.


	13. Morgenstern

No one threw funerals for serial killers, less so when they were psychotic.

That was okay. No one needed to pay respects or sympathy. It was Waylon’s task, no one else’s. He held the vase close to his chest, looking out the window as Lisa drove him. She’d allowed him this one thing, maybe only because the therapist and psychiatrist both thought it would provide closure.

Waylon didn’t care what they believed. 

He wouldn’t put Eddie in the ground, caged in a coffin. It was a final gift, to free Eddie from containment in one form or another.

They came to a stop at the lakehouse. No one was there.

It’d been a good year since Eddie’s death, and the media ate it up. Ironically, it also meant further exposure of Murkoff, and somewhere, Waylon believed that someone felt a pang of sympathy for Eddie upon learning his torture. If only for a moment, that meant something.

He gave Lisa’s hand a squeeze. They weren’t back together, but she had, with time and effort on both their parts, grounded herself as his partner.

He was glad for it. He was glad for Eddie. He admitted that openly now.

Eddie had given him a new look on his life, however stained it was. He’d never be the same, but that was fine. He would die eventually, so, what did it matter if he was fucked up for it?

Lisa stayed in the car, let him take his time.

He looked over the lake a while, not thinking of anything. Then, gradually, he opened the urn.

“Thanks,” was all he could think of to say.

He released the ashes, watched them melt into water, to air, to the world. Jacob, upon learning had left for good, had asked him why Eddie was that way. When Waylon couldn’t articulate it, Jacob had said he believed Eddie loved so much it made him sick.

Guess that was true.

So, probably still sick himself, Waylon watched a little longer, then went back to the jeep.

“I’m ready to go home now,” he told her.

She smiled and nodded.

He never did see the shadow looking out from the other side of the lake.

-x-

Where Waylon had spiralled into madness after Eddie’s initial escape, he became proactive in the wake of his death. He publicly announced Murkoff’s misdeeds, wanting the world to see his face, to know if he was killed, it was because of them.

Eddie’s story, however, he left to officials and media. The truth, what he had, that was for him. Only him. He spent time, not a lot, but on the days he felt afraid, he would watch the clips he took with his sons and Eddie.

And somewhere among the nth view, not long after getting off work as a software intelligence engineered that sought to help people, the idea struck him.

He was separated from Lisa, but they managed well together that way. They both raised their children, and maybe there was someone looking after him, because she gradually agreed to support his endeavor.

There weren’t really orphanages around, but foster homes were just as mucky.

He’d been nervous, worried he’d be turned down because of his background, because of who knew. 

But then again, they were desperate to kick out the older kids.

And Waylon saw him instantly, gravitated toward the boy, knew that was the one.

He was very young, dark hair, and a shock of beautifully blue eyes. Familiar. Lonely. 

Waylon crouched down where the boy looked busy with some fabric in his corner of the ratty home.

“Hey, there. I’m Waylon. What’s that you’re working on?”

The boy shrugged one shoulder. “A vest.”

Waylon paused. “You...sew?”

“Kind of. They don’t really give us stuff so I have to learn on my own. They don’t know I have a needle. But I need a vest for my shirt.”

“Why’s that?”

“No one wants to adopt older kids. If I look nice, they’ll change their mind.”

Waylon smiled. “I think you’re pretty neat so far.”

The child raised his head at last.

Waylon glanced around, then back at the orphan.

“This place looks kinda crummy. If you’re okay with it, I’d like...well...I think you could use a better home.”

The child’s eyes widened. Then, narrowed in suspicion.

“Adopt...me?”

“You can sew anything you want at my place if you still want.”

The boy stood up, clutching his fabric.

“...Okay,” he said, and smiled a smile that lifted Waylon’s long sunken heart.

He offered his hand.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Eddie.”

Waylon’s heart skipped. Eddie’s little hand fit snug in his, so tiny, so unlike--He shook his head, chuckled and began guiding Eddie through the home and outside into the daylight.

“Well, then, Eddie, let’s go home.”

-Fin-


End file.
